LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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Boole 










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COHfRIGHT DEPOSm 



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FELLOW CAPTAINS 



The foolishest book is a leaky boat 
upon the sea of wisdom: some of the 
wisdom will get in anyhow. — Holmes. 



FELLOW CAPTAINS 



All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. 
John Masefield 



SARAH N. XLEGHORN 

AND 

DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1916 



j6£> 



^'' ,,-f^ 






COPYRIGHT, 191 6, BY 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Portions of this volume have been copyrighted sepa- 
rately as follows: The Secret of Serenity, copyright, 
1907, by The Ridgway Company. Come, Captain Age! 
copyright, 1916, by The Century Company. The 
Lookout, The Anodyne, For Believers in Immortality 
[as "Mother"], copyright, 1916, by The Atlantic 
Monthly Company. The Deep Spring in the Ever- 
green Forest, copyright, 1913, by the Frank A. Munsey 
Rec" 
Als 
1915, by The Ridgway Company. To Keep Alive the 



Company. To Realize the Quality of Immortality [aa 
" But This is Also Everiasting Life "1, copyright, 
)15, by The Ridgway Company. To Keep Alive the 
Spirit of Adventure [as " The Young Man's Dariing "], 
copyright, 1913, by The Phillips Publishing Company 




NOV 16 1916 



©C!.A445bi)i 

V 



Blow, wind; swell, billow; and swim, bark I 

Shakespeare. 

His eyes forever on some sign 
To help him plough a perfect line. 

John Masefield. 

The difference between happiness and sorrow is as between 
a glad, enhghtened acceptance of life and a hostile, gloomy 
submission. Maeterlinck. 

I count life just a stuff 

To try the soul's strength on. 

Browning. 

Let those fear who wiU. The soul is in her native realm, 
and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich 
as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuseth with a beautiful 
scorn. They are not for her, who putteth on her coronation 
robes and goeth out through universal love to universgJ 
power. Emerson. 

The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts: 
and the great art of hfe is to have as many of them as 
possible. Montaigne. 

Miirger said of himself that his heart was always on the 
side of the singing grasshopper. 



FELLOW CAPTAINS 



LOQUENTES PERSONAE 

I. Anna, a handsome, self-confident spinster, about 
forty-five years of age, who has spent twenty 
eminently successful years at the head of a New 
York business office but is now taking a year's 
leave of absence because she has been threatened 
with a nervous breakdown. She is a brisk, out- 
spoken, clear-thinking, slightly sardonic woman, 
of whom her friends often say that her bark is 
worse than her bite. 
II. Sarah, also a spinster, eager, ardent, tenacious; 

a writer of magazine verses. 
III. Emily, a gentle, affectionate, and yielding house- 
mother, with three partly grown-up sons and a 
tennis-playing, successful business husband. She 
is considered by her friends to incline to the sen- 
timental, which perhaps means that she is the 
most spiritual-minded of the group. 
IV. Mildred, intelligent, thoughtful, fastidiously 
impatient of the obvious, highly sophisticated. 
She is a brilliant example of the modern school 
teacher, a typical twentieth-century unmarried 
woman; independent, but of a less aggressive type 
than Anna. 

V. Dorothy, a housewife, mother, and novelist, who 
was, with odd inappropriateness, trained to 
special knowledge in Old French philology, and 
still preserves a leaning towards analytic ways of 
thought, united with considerable courage in pur- 
suing them, and accepting their conclusions. 



THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB was as- 
sembled. This traditional, rather pon- 
derous formula means that five neither young 
nor old American women had settled themselves 
in wicker chairs on the porch for the twice-a- 
month conversation in which, for a good many 
years, this group of hfelong friends had talked 
over their differences of opinion. 

"Well, it's my turn," said Dorothy, taking 
some sheets of manuscript from her work-basket, 
" to start things today. And if you don't mind, 
I'm going to read you a fantastic parable I've 
just finished. You're used to being the dog 
things are tried on." 

"What's it about .^" asked Anna, with the 
shghtly impatient note of suspicion always 
aroused in her by the fantastic. 

"Oh, it's no fairy tale," Dorothy reassured 
her. "It started with nothing more fanciful 
than Elbert Willings who absent-mindedly hoed 
up an entire row of new onions in my garden 
yesterday." 

"He did?'' said Emily, sympathetically, 
"Isn't he the maddeningly exasperating boy! 
The day he came to weed our garden last week 
he carefully took out my whole bed of portu- 



4 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

laca because he thought it was pigweed! What 
did you do ? I should have thought you'd have 
felt hke ..." 

"Well, I did, just that, all of it, and more," 
Dorothy answered the unspoken description 
of rage. "And then on my way back to the 
house, still boiling within, I happened to 
stand under our big crab-apple tree for a few 
minutes. It's all in bloom now, hke one great 
bouquet, you know, and the bees make such 
a hmnming in it, it makes me think of a mon- 
strous 'cello having its lowest string tuned 
up softly. I stood there, looking up into that 
canopy of flowers, until the bees began to 
murmur to me that the pillars of the world 
wouldn't fall if Elbert Wilhngs had hoed up an 
entire row of new onions. And after a while, 
the humming got inside my head, and I car- 
ried it off with me to my study and wrote this 
out of it." 

She unfolded the manuscript and began to 
read 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 

ONCE upon a time there was a kingdom full 
of very unhappy people; and yet they 
were not all devoured by remorse because they 
had murdered their grandmothers nor had 
they all some dreadful and incurable disease 
which left them no hope. They were just ordi- 
nary people who had a great many reasons to 
find Hfe dehghtful, but who were so given to 
looking on the dark side of things that they 
never found time really to enjoy themselves. 
When it rained they worried for fear of floods. 
Not that they ever had any, but they had read 
of them in other countries, and they felt that in 
this hfe you never can be sure. When the sun 
shone they were afraid of drought, although 
the lovely valley where they Hved was watered 
by a thousand springs. When they had bad 
servants they worried about their stealing, and 
when they had good ones they worried about 
their leaving. And so it went on from bad to 
worse until you never saw a smiling, contented 
face anywhere in the kingdom. In fact they 
all looked remarkably hke the faces we see in 
the street-cars today. 

Well, one day a wonderful thing happened to 



6 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

that country, although the people knew noth- 
ing of it for some time. A Wise Man came to 
the top of the mountain overlooking the valley 
and gazing down on the hurrying throngs of 
miserable inhabitants he was filled with pity 
and said to himself, "I will go down and rescue 
this folk from the woe which overwhelms them. 
I will take to them my wonderful discovery, 
*The Secret of Serenity.'" So down the steep 
slope he proceeded, his heart filled with sym- 
pathy for the inhabitants of The Unhappy 
Kingdom. 

Now you are to remember about this man 
that he was wise — really astonishingly wise, 
as the rest of this story will show. 

The first person he met was an individual 
sitting in an attitude of despair beside the road. 
The Wise Man accosted him. "What's up, 
my friend?" he said in a cheery tone. 

The other raised his head and looked at him 
with lack-lustre eyes. "Nothing's up and 
everything's down, as it always is," he said 
drearily. "I am the Court Barber and I have 
just learned that a special pearl-handled razor 
which I ordered for the Crown Prince cannot 
be finished when I thought it would. I am 
the most unhappy man in the world!" He 
dropped his head dispiritedly on his hands; for 
that was the sort of thing which made the 
people of this land so miserable. 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 7 

The Wise Man gazed at him in thoughtful 
silence for a moment, and then s£dd, "Listen, 
friend, I have a sure and unfaihng recipe for 
serenity. Once learned, all your troubles roll 
from you Hke water from a duck's back. Kjiow- 
ing it, you simply cannot worry any more 
than you can pick up quicksilver with a 
needle." 

The Court Barber looked at him skeptically. 
"That may do for some one who has no real 
troubles! But what good could it do me when 
calamity is upon me and my razors do not 
arrive on time!" At the thought he groaned 
aloud. 

The Wise Man approached him mysteriously, 
and whispered, "Seeing it's you, I'll sell you 
the recipe for less than to most folks," and 
with that he mentioned a sum which made the 
Barber give a start of amazement, it was so 
tremendously large. He looked at the Wise 
Man with a new interest. " It must be mighty 
fine to cost all that! Does it really cure all 
one's troubles.^" 

"Not all," said the Wise Man. "But nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand. 
And the thousandth it helps a good deal." 

"Well, think of that now," said the Barber 
thoughtfully; and after he had meditated a 
moment he said briskly, "Well, I'll pay that 
for a sure recipe for serenity. Come, you tell 



8 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

me now, and I'll pay you as soon as I get to 
the city." 

The Wise Man started back, horror on his 
face. "You don't suppose so tremendous a 
secret can be babbled on the highway!" he 
cried reproachfully. "You must go home and 
prepare yourself for three days by fasting and 
meditation, and then, when you come to me, 
it takes two days' constant study to learn the 
mighty secret. You must approach it in a 
reverent spirit." 

The Barber looked greatly abashed at this 
rebuke, and a little alarmed at the notion of 
learning so deep a mystery, and the two walked 
along in a solemn silence. 

It all came about as the Wise Man com- 
manded. The Barber fasted and meditated 
three days and on the fourth presented himself 
at the house where the Wise Man had settled. 
There, before he was allowed to part the blood- 
red cm-tain which hung before the door, he 
was made to swear by all that he held sacred 
that he would not betray the secret. Giving 
a last look at the cheerful sun and famihar 
out-of-doors he took the final step, and with a 
palpitating heart entered the house of mystery. 
No one saw anything of him for two days, but 
then he opened the door and stepped out — 
another man. Tranquillity shone upon his 
brow and his eyes beamed in a glad content. 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 9 

People stared after him in the streets in amaze- 
ment, very much as they would do now, if 
anybody should walk along the pubHc highway 
looking hke that. 

At the door of his house his wife met him, 
her face drawn and twitching in nervous ex- 
asperation. " Oh, Henry ! " she exclaimed petu- 
lantly, "what do you think has happened now! 
I've found the cook using the table butter for 
frying potatoes! With plenty of cooking but- 
ter right at hand! Does it seem possible any- 
body can be so utterly conscienceless!" She 
sighed wearily as if life were a burden too heavy 
to be borne. 

The Barber gazed at her intently. His hps 
moved as if he were repeating some formula. 
At the end a flashing gladness came into his 
eyes. Clasping his poor, unliappy wife to his 
heart he exclaimed, " It really does the business! 
If we must mortgage all that we possess, you 
too shall learn the Secret of Serenity." 

WTien he went to shave the Royal Family 
that day he found the King's uncle in a desper- 
ate frame of mind, his old face so full of care- 
worn wrinkles that the razor could scarcely 
pass over them. The Grand Duke looked in 
astonishment at the smihng face of his Barber. 
It was an unusual sight in that place. "How 
can anybody look pleased in such an irritating 
world as this!" he snapped crossly. "It gets 



10 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

worse and worse! It does seem to me that, old 
man as I am, I might be allowed a few things 
I want, instead of being balked and baffled at 
every turn. Here I had ordered up the royal 
galley to take me for a ride on the harbor, and 
the captain has the total lack of consideration 
for my gray hairs to come and say that new 
upholstery is being put on the deck seats and I 
can't go until tomorrow. It's always that way 
with me. Tomorrow it'll rain, I'll warrant ! " 

The Barber's heart swelled with pity for the 
wretched old man, and, pausing with his brush 
full of lather, he told him about the wonderful 
magician who had just arrived with his wonder- 
ful secret. He spoke so warmly and described 
so glowingly how already he felt trebly paid, 
even for the great sum it had cost him, that 
the King's uncle decided to go and try it, 
although he had no faith in it. 

You can imagine what happened after the 
King's uncle and the Barber's wife had 
emerged from the house of mystery, with beam- 
ing faces and upUfted hearts. There was a 
regular rush to the Wise Man and people stood 
in hue to wait their turn. The Wise Man 
became so wealthy that he did not have room 
enough to store all his gold, and the people of 
that country became so cheerful that the name 
of the valley was changed to "The Happy 
Land." By and by, when there were no more 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 11 

of the Royal Family, the Wise Man was made 
King. And for a long time everything went to 
perfection. 

But the Wise Man had a son, and hke other 
wise men when it came to his own family his 
wisdom disappeared. He allowed this boy 
(and he was Crown Prince, remember, with all 
the need for wisdom of that position!) to study 
every thing he pleased and only what he pleased, 
and uttered no word of protest against the 
one-sidedness of the lad's theories about political 
economy and ethics and the nature of govern- 
ment. He smiled indulgently when his coun- 
selors told him of the quaint and whimsical 
ideas of his son and said, "What's this about 
* absolute ethics'?" 

"Why, the Prince thinks that every one 
should tell nothing but the baldest matter-of- 
fact truth — as he calls it," cried the old coun- 
selors in dismay. "And he doesn't beheve in 
allowing a grain of imagination to remain. 
And he says that manipulating reahty is sin!" 

The old King laughed outright. "He's 
young! He's young!" he said. "Give him 
time and he'll get some sense. I was just so 
at his age." 

As a matter of fact the Prince was young, 
under twenty-one. This was the age set at 
which those inhabitants of The Happy Land 
who could afford it, learned the Secret of Seren- 



12 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

ity. "When he's of age," said the old King, 
"I'll have a serious talk with him, tell him 
about the secret and we'll get all these 
twists in his head straightened out. You'll 
see what a sensible man he'll make." 

But the unexpected happened, as it will do 
even to wise people, and the day before the 
Prince's twenty-first birthday the old King 
died and left the kingdom to be governed by 
the Prince without any words of advice from 
him, and without a knowledge of the Secret 
of Serenity. 

It is possible that if the Prince had learned 
it from the old King who best understood the 
true nature of it, all might have been well; 
but he was initiated by a circle of white- 
bearded, solemn old wise-acres, and he came 
out from the house of mystery with a crude 
scorn on his beardless face, and a sore and 
misunderstanding contempt for his father in 
his fooKsh young heart. " It's a farce, a fraud, 
the most hoary and contemptible of supersti- 
tions!" he cried, "and my first duty to my 
people is to disabuse them of this error." 

For this was the secret. 

I can't stop to tell you of all the ceremonious 
rites by which it was approached, but when 
you got there, the formula was this. When 
you were troubled and worried; as when you 
found the cat asleep in your best hat, or when 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 13 

right in church you thought with a pang that 
you'd given your stenographer the wrong sum 
for that shipping of iron nails, or when, driving 
back from town, you suddenly remembered 
that you had not told the groceryman the 
very thing you went to town to tell him, or, 
while you were taking tea with a neighbor, 
when it suddenly came into your mind that 
you'd forgotten to tell the cook at home to 
use the three tomatoes in the corner of the ice- 
box for soup . . . when any of the thousand 
worries which day after day draw your face 
into fretful hues, came into your mind, you 
were to go through the following process: 

"Think carefully and intently of a rabbit, 
jumping over a brush fence back and forward, 
lippety-lop, three times; try to see in your 
mind's eye three black hens in the snow; 
think of an apple tree all rosy in the spring; 
and try to remember how it smells in the woods 
in spring after a rain. Then suddenly think 
again of the worry that affhcts you, and at once 
apply every energy of your mind to thinking, 
saying, and feeUng with all your might, "What 
o/it! What 0/ it!" 

Thus — to give a concrete example — sup- 
pose you are sitting in church and you think 
of the three tomatoes and you frown and 
say fretfully to yourself, "Oh, bother! The 
cook will never find those, and if she does she 



14 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

won't have the sense to use them for soup 
today before they spoil." 

At once you begin, run rapidly over the for- 
mula and end with, "Well, what of it! What 
if she doesn't!" 

If you are an inveterate worrier you may still 
screw your face up irritably and say to your- 
self, "Why, by tomorrow they'll be too old to 
use!" 

Again the formula and again you say, " Well, 
what of it, really now? Suppose they areV 
Usually this makes you smile at the smallness 
of the worry, but some there are who must 
apply the formula still further. If there is 
still in your mind the wail, "Why, I'll have to 
throw them away! Three tomatoes!" the 
formula continues its heahng work, "What 
of it! What if I do! Three tomatoes! against 
my peace of mind! " 

And let me tell you, there are very few who 
cannot, by this time, with an amused smile 
at their own folly, sit back contentedly to hsten 
to the minister talking about the beauties of 
rehgion. 

This was the great secret, and this was what 
so revolted the hot-headed young Prince. 
"Oh! what base treachery did my father prac- 
tise on his unsuspecting people!" he cried with 
the bitterness of disillusion. "Why, there is 
nothing to that so-called mystery but common 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 15 

sense! Anybody knows that much! Think of 
making poor people pay out of their pitiful 
little wages for such a simple thing as that. 
For you can't deceive me!" he shouted, getting 
more and more excited, and shaking his fist 
in the faces of the old men, who were gazing 
at him sadly, "You can't deceive me with 
your hugger-muggery of black hens and jump- 
ing r£ibbits. They have nothing to do with it! 
All there is to your silly old mystery is to say 
*What of it,' and as far even as that goes, I 
don't approve of the idea. Suppose a switch- 
man should say coolly, * There, I've forgotten 
to shut the switch and the express train will 
smash into the switch and be wrecked, but 
what of it? I shan't stir from my comfort- 
able bed.'" 

The old counselors looked at each other in 
dismay. Said one, "Sire, we be aged men, 
having hved many more years than Your 
Highness, and you must allow that we may 
have learned a httle wisdom. No one ever 
supposed the magic formula would apply to 
everything. Indeed that is its chief value — 
to act as a touchstone to distinguish between 
real and fancied worries. For if you had Hved 
but a very few years longer you would know 
that it is the small and imaginary worries 
which poison hmnan life. Great and real 
troubles only sweeten and ripen people. The 



16 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

switchman when he thinks of the open switch 
and asks himself, *what of it?' springs to 
his feet at once as he sees the possible con- 
sequence of his action; and it is evident that 
he will move with ten times the energy and 
force he would have had if he had worried 
equally about an open switch and losing his 
penknife. As to the black hens and apple 
trees you so rashly despise, they serve a 
twofold purpose. First, they divert the mind 
from the trifling worry which afflicts it and, 
secondly, they make the worriers think, in 
flowering apple trees and fragrant forests, 
of something infinitely pleasing, before they 
come to the vital point. As to the mys- 
teries of initiation, and the cost therefor, it is 
scarcely possible that even Your Majesty is 
so young and has seen so Httle of the world 
as to fancy that people will value what is 
given them freely or what they can readily 
imderstand." 

The young King looked at them in disgust. 
"You are hke all old people," he said in cold 
scorn. "You have lost your faith in human 
nature, and you degrade Truth by mixing it 
with superstition. I have trust in my people 
and the first act of my reign shall be to call 
them all together and tell them the truth 
about your formula." 

The old men fell on their knees in terror, but 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 17 

their prayers were of no avail. The young 
King was inexorably upright. " No more cheat- 
ing of ignorant, hard-working people for me!" 
he cried in a fine burst of pig-headed altruism. 
"The truth! The truth!" 

The next day in all the highways and by- 
paths of the kingdom there rode heralds of 
the King, drawing the people about them and 
electrifying the crowds by announcing that the 
next evening the king would, from the balcony 
of his palace, express to his subjects publicly 
the mighty Secret of Serenity, which had 
hitherto been sold at so high a price. 

You can imagine the stir this made. Men 
left their work and hurried home to tell their 
wives about it, women began planning at once 
what the children should wear, and young ladies 
put their cm-ling-irons on to heat. The next 
day the roads were filled with excited and happy 
folk, walking and driving, in carts and wagons 
and ox-carts; rich and poor, old and young, 
and all with the same look of supreme expec- 
tation on their faces. Of coin-se people who 
had already bought the Secret were provoked 
that it should be given away free, but they 
could not understand how what had cost them 
so much time and trouble to learn could be 
told in a few minutes in pubHc. So they went 
along out of curiosity. 

By nightfall the pubHc square was packed 



18 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

with an expectant throng, gazing up at the 
palace with eager eyes. The young King 
looked down on them and his generous, fool- 
ish heart yearned over them. He had said 
that when the cathedral clock struck eight he 
would begin his announcement and he could 
scarcely wait the appointed hour. As the 
great strokes boomed out over the square a 
breathless hush settled on the crowd. The 
King stepped hurriedly out on the balcony and 
raised his hand. "My people," he said in 
solemn tones, "I am about to put a great trust 
in you. I am going to give you freely and in a 
pure and truthful form, the secret which has 
so long been sold in a corrupt version. This 
is the secret." 

The people held their breaths. 

"When anything worries you, simply think, 
'What of it?'" 

Even as he spoke, although he was so young 
and foolish and in such a state of exaltation, 
the King was aware that there was something 
lacking. It did not sound impressive. "That 
is all," he went on rather lamely, "you just 
say 'what of it ?' and think how, after all, your 
worry is a small one and it will disappear." 

The people were perfectly silent for a mo- 
ment. The young King had expected this, 
but he had not expected the angry babel which 
broke out an instant later. Furious shouts of 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 19 

disappointment and anger at what they con- 
sidered a cruel practical joke rose to his as- 
tonished ears, mingled with triumphant cries 
from those who had already known the secret, 
of, "No! No! Don't beheve him! He doesn't 
know it all! That is only a mutilated version. 
It is a great and sacred secret." 

To these last the King answered hotly, "You 
poor deluded fools! Your rabbits and your 
black hens and your red curtains and your 
fasting and all are simple nonsense. They are 
only used to throw dust in your eyes." 

At last the true behevers fell silent, hurt to 
the heart. All their hves they had known and 
trusted that formula, and it had saved them 
from every petty misery. Now at one stroke 
to have it shorn of mystery and ridiculed by 
the King himself, shook them with a rending 
pain. With angry shouts they too joined the 
rioters who were storming the doors of the 
palace, crying for revenge on the heartless 
mocking young sovereign, who had so played 
with their most sacred emotions and faiths. 

Inside, the young man stood aghast. The 
white-haired old counselors moaned, and rent 
their garments, and his world, his foohsh, study- 
book, two-dimension world fell in pieces about 
his head. 

But wisdom came too late to save his king- 
dom. After the crowd withdrew, sullen and 



20 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

tired of trying in vain to force their way into 
the palace; even after they had gone back 
peaceably enough to their daily work, he found 
them a changed people. Gloomy, fretful faces 
sm-rounded him on every side. Nervous pros- 
tration came into fashion again with the rich, 
and suicides with the poor. At one jump the 
kingdom had gone back to its former state, 
and by common consent the name was changed 
too, to "The Unhappy Kingdom." The King 
was as miserable as his subjects and was known 
as "Lurenoff of the Mournful Eyes." He was 
in despair over his mistake. He wept over it 
in the night-time and groaned aloud by day, 
but there was no remedy. With one sweep of 
his rash young hand he had shattered the edifice 
it had taken his wise old father years to build, 
and it could no more be restored than a burst 
soap-bubble. Once he tried to repair the dam- 
age by getting the people together and explain- 
ing to them; but they were so exasperated 
by the mere mention of the matter that they 
mobbed his heralds in the highways and he 
was forced to give it up. 

Long years he lived and reigned, a broken- 
hearted man, seeing no cheerful face in all his 
kingdom, and hearing naught but fretful and 
despairing voices. One day, however, he was 
riding sadly along through a narrow, hedge- 



THE SECRET OF SERENITY 21 

bordered road when he heard some one singing 
in so joyous a tone, with so merry and care- 
free an accent, that he stopped, amazed, sweet 
souvenirs of his lost childhood crowding into 
his heart. An old, old man, bent with infirmi- 
ties, was walking along, pushing a heavy bar- 
row, stumbling and tripping weakly as he 
labored, but always pouring out this flood of 
cheerful melody. Beside him Avall^ed a man 
with the gloomy visage of irritation and dis- 
content the King saw constantly on all his 
subjects. He was young and strong and the 
world was all glorious about him, but he glow- 
ered fretfully at the King, whom he did not 
recognize, and said with an accent of savage 
gloom: "Well, I'm glad to see somebody I can 
exchange a word with and relieve my mind. I 
was looking forward to a pleasant day, though 
I maght have known that we never can have 
that in this world. And now I remember that 
we've taken the longest way to get to the village 
and lost as much as twenty minutes. There is 
always something to thwart me in whatever 
I . . . " 

The King broke in impatiently on his com- 
plaint to ask, "What makes that old man so 
cheerful, when he's old and poor and must work 
so hard?" 

The young man spoke with a sort of culmi- 
nation of exasperation: "Isn't he irritating! 



22 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

He's an old fool who still believes in that 
exploded Secret of Serenity. He learned it 
when he was young, and by the time the 
young King told us what a fraud it was he 
had grown stone deaf, and as he can't read, 
he's never learned that it doesn't amount to 
anything." 

The King looked in silence at the old man, 
who, giving him a cheery nod of greeting as 
he passed, went singing gaily down the road. 
Long after the hedges had hidden him from 
sight, the sound of his hght-hearted song hung 
in the air. 



But is it Artificial? 

WLEN she had finished, there was a mo- 
ment's silence and then Anna, with the 
resentful air of one who has been rather a 
dupe — for after all it had been fanciful — 
said, "Well, I for one am totally in sym- 
pathy with the young king. He looked things 
straight in the face. No mystery, mummery, 
abracadabra, presto change for himl Or for 
me. Life is hard," Anna pronounced with 
all the fervent pessimism of the successful, 
prosperous person. "It's full of disappoint- 
ments, worry and troubles of all sorts. Better 
meet it on its own ground and see it as it is, 
not try to throw rose-water over it and fight 
a shaded lamp to look at it by." 

"I'm incfined to agree with you, Anna. I'm 
not much in sympathy with artificial helps in 
fiving, or trying to alter the essential facts by 
an ingenious stage setting," said Mildred, speak- 
ing as usual slowly and thoughtfully, with an 
instinctive guard over her words. 

"But is it artificial, is it mysterious?" 
Sarah demanded eagerly. "Isn't it natural 
to have flesh on the skeleton, and leaves on 
the trees ? You know, Dorothy, — maybe you 



24 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

all know, — I've been using something a good 
deal like that for years. It doesn't seem a bit 
mysterious when you do it. Not a bit Hke a 
stage setting or a shaded lamp! You feel a 
great deal more normal and reasonable than 
you ever did before." 

"Black hens aren't anything so excessively 
uncommon, that you should all be calling them 
artificial and mysterious," protested Dorothy, 
tucking her manuscript under a bulging pile 
of rompers and overalls in her work-basket. 
"Rabbits, woods, snow — nothing unusual 
about any of them. Even red curtains aren't 
unknown. My Aimt Mattie used to have some 
in her Hving-room." 

"Well, I don't care, I call it intellectually 
dishonest to try to cover up the hard facts of 
life in any such fanciful way," Anna insisted. 

"I don't. I think it's lovely to escape from 
them sometimes," Emily mused aloud, with a 
wistful look on her over-refined, fair face. 

"The point is, it wasnt escaping from hard 
facts or trying to cover them up! Just the 
opposite! The whole idea is trying to see all 
the facts you possibly can! It's opening your 
eyes wider and trying not to squint at things 
and distort and twist and magnify them. The 
whole object is to let in more fight, and clearer 
fight. If you'd only try it for yourselves, all 
of you, you'd see!" cried Sarah, warmly. 



BUT IS IT ARTIFICIAL? 25 

" Dorothy has just made a romance with a few 
httle whimsical curlicues in it, just enough to 
keep you all guessing as much as is healthy 
for you. ..." 

Emily looked from Dorothy to Sarah with 
an air at once thoroughly puzzled, a Uttle timid 
and rather hopeful. 

"Just whimsical enough to keep ice in the 
refrigerator so it won't go sour," continued 
Sarah, "but the material she has used is plain 
dandehon greens she has picked in her own 
front yard, and the meadow opposite, and what 
those Court Barbers and Prime Ministers do 
in the story is just essentially what any num- 
ber of more or less hard-headed people do 
all the time, and what any number more — 
everybody in fact! — could do. She has just 
taken off the materiahstic bhnders Anna 
always thinks she can see better with." 

Anna laughed good-naturedly with the others 
and remarked without perturbation, "I can 
see pretty well, thank you." 

"A funny thing too," Sarah went on, "is 
that we all do it in a few cases; about as much 
as a New York family exercise their dog. They 
take it out for a walk round the block when 
fifteen miles across country is what it needs. 
That's just about the amount of exertion we 
get out of our perfectly ready and willing (not 
to say pining) subconscious powers." 



26 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

"What few cases do we use it in, I'd like to 
know?" asked Anna belligerently, "I don't 
know what in the name of sense it is, but I 
warrant I don't use it at all!" 

"What'Uyou bet?" 

"Sundaes for the Club." 

"All right. Let's see now. Do you ever 
impress upon yourself to wake up at exactly 
ten minutes of seven?" 

"Why, certainly! That's nothing queer or 
peculiar or mysterious." 

"Certainly not. Nothing about our notions 
either that's at all queer or peculiar. Why 
should you say it's not peculiar to order your- 
self to wake up at ten minutes of seven and 
insist that it's abracadabra to order yourself 
to wake up in a good temper ? Here's a whole 
department of each of us that's not Kving on 
the surface, a great division of human nature 
Hving in the dark, in the garret or the cellar, 
whichever you hke. ..." 

"Cheer up, everybody. Sarah always has to 
trot out that subconscious self. It's aU the 
fashion nowadays, hke full skirts," said Mil- 
dred, resignedly. "Go on, Sarah, do." 

"Well, Anna, don't you see, you impress it 
on your mind, as the saying goes, to wake 
you up at six-fifty. You do wake up at six- 
fifty. Trust the little old subconscious for that. 
He'll turn the trick. And that's not the only 



BUT IS IT ARTIFICIAL? 27 

thing we use it for, either. I don't suppose 
there's a person alive that hasn't thought up a 
name.''^ 

"Now she's going to claim that she and 
Dorothy invented the human memory," said 
Anna. 

"Well, look here, Anna, just look at what we 
do, when we 'think up' a name. First we im- 
press on ourselves (did you ever stop to think 
how we always call our subconscious selves, 
our selves, and so they are, the biggest part of 
ourselves) ..." 

Anna and Mildred both groaned, and Mildred 
said, "She's worse than usual." 

"We make a great point of the general idea 
of the name we want," continued Sarah ear- 
nestly. "We go round and round it, describing 
what it almost is and isn't quite. . . . No, it 
isn't Campbell. No, it isn't Clayton. Cool- 
edge ? No. But it's something with a capital 
'C and a httle *!' in it. Why, we tell the 
sub-conscious confidential clerk exactly what to 
look for as if we were saying to the cook, *In 
the second bureau drawer you'll find a gray 
knitted shawl — no, not a shawl exactly, 
one of these what-you-call 'ems, worsted 
things, with a point in the back and a point 
in front. You'll find it all right by that de- 
scription.' And then you go on with whatever 
you're doing and wait for her to find and bring 



28 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

you the what-you-call 'em. Exactly the same 
with the subconscious clerk. Off he goes, and 
you calmly stop thinking about it and go on 
reading the paper or sorting the children's 
socks or watering the geraniums. You say, 
'When I'm not thinking of it, it'll come to 
me'; and of course it does, handed up on a 
tray from the neat underground shelves of the 
subconscious memory. * Caldwell! That's 
what it is! I knew it would come to me!'" 

"Do you mean to say you call that using 
the subconscious?" Mildred asked incredu- 
lously. 

"Of course we do, because it is. There are 
dozens and dozens of ways the subconscious 
self expresses itself through the body, without 
any orders at all. The trouble is they're so 
common we never think of their being there. 
Take blushing for instance. Take crying. Take 
the way your heart acts when you hear a call 
of *Fire!' in a crowded place. Take the wave 
of actual physical nausea that rolls over you at 
the sight of some horrible medicine you re- 
member only too well and have to take again." 

"Well, that sounds better than some of the 
I'arned talk you've had about that old sub- 
conscious," confessed Mildred. 

"You see Dorothy hasn't invented so much 
of that story after all. As I said before, she's 
looked around and picked out facts that every- 



A SELF-SUGGESTER 29 

body else, or nearly everybody else, all but 
those Emmanuel Movement people and a few 
other lucid exceptions, have walked over, and 
trampled underfoot, all their hves. Gracious 
Heavens! How we have wasted it on thinking 
up names and waking up at ten minutes of 
seven and never once using it for anything 
the least bit important!" 

"You keep talking about *it' and saying 
you do *it,' Sarah. What is it that you do? 
And how did you ever begin in the first place?" 

Autobiography of a Self-Suggester 

"Didn't I ever tell you? Why it was that 
old hay fever of mine that really drove me into 
learning how to give myself a brace. Don't 
you remember how I used to sneeze and choke ? 
My! But how that miserable httle chronic 
ailment spoiled my summers! You know I had 
a lot of surgical treatment, but it really didn't 
permanently improve at all, and at last I be- 
gan to get the notion that there was an element 
of hysteria mixed up in it. I thought if I could 
only forget to sneeze my head off every morn- 
ing, forget to expect to choke and wheeze, I 
would get out of the habit and begin to get 
well. So I asked the doctor and he said, *0h 
yes, it wouldn't do me or anybody else any 
harm to cheer up a Httle and forget their un- 



30 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

comfortable feelings as often as they could.' 
And I said something about it to the family at 
home, and they all said *yes, that was a good 
idea,' and I'd better by all means cheer up 
and forget my hay fever. All my friends ap- 
proved. 'Take your mind right off it,' they 
said; * think you're going to be better and you 
will be. Don't give it a thought,' and so on. 

"Well, that was all very encouraging, but it 
sounded a little like pulhng yourself up by 
your bootstraps. I didn't know how to go to 
work, cheering up and forgetting. I didn't 
seem to have any tools." 

"Why didn't you write to Dr. Worcester, of 
the Emmanuel Church in Boston," asked 
Emily. "That's what I should have done." 

"That's just what I did do. I just plainly 
stated my case and asked where I should apply, 
living up here in Vermont, to get instructions 
how to begin. In due time I got an answer. 
Dr. Worcester had found time to write to me, 
among goodness knows how many other stran- 
gers, and to tell me to read two books, which 
I bought for a moderate price: Feuchtersleben, 
that famous old Viennese doctor, you know, on 
'Health and Suggestion,' and a book called 'The 
Mystic Will,' by C. G. Leland." 

"Were they any good?" asked Mildred. 

"They were just exactly what I needed. 
They put the tools right in my hand. They 



A SELF-SUGGESTER 31 

came on the morning mail, I spent most of the 
afternoon reading them, and by the time I went 
to bed (where I generally woke up at two in 
the morning and sneezed and choked and 
smarted till five) I was ready to begin." 

"What did you do?" asked Mildred. 

"Why, I willed myself, just as the book said, 
to sleep quietly and breathe comfortably all 
night. Or, if I waked up, just quietly to fall 
asleep again." 

"Did it work.^" asked Anna and Emily 
at once. 

"Do you know I can't even tell you about it 
now, five years afterwards, without getting 
excited," confessed Sarah. "I woke up at the 
usual time, scared to death for fear the new 
idea wouldn't work, and I'd begin to sneeze 
as usual. But I didn't. Minutes crept along, 
and still I didn't sneeze. After a long time I 
cautiously turned over. Still no sneezes. The 
clock struck the half hour. I began to get 
sleepy. I went to sleep emd slept until morn- 
ing; and I've never had those midnight sneezes 
since, — not once." 

"Well, I should say that showed there was 
a lot of hysteria mixed up with them!" ex- 
claimed Anna. 

"Certainly it does. But call it what you 
like, I was losing weight and losing appetite 
and feehng generally miserable. The doctor 



32 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

couldn't stop them, and people telling me to 
cheer up and forget them didn't do me a par- 
ticle of good, though I wanted so very much to 
follow that advice." 

"How well did it keep on working when the 
novelty wore off?" asked Anna shrewdly. 

"Well, it didn't always work as well as that, 
and once or twice, that first simimer, I got 
quite discouraged. But the books said not to 
get discouraged, to keep hammering away; and 
I did keep hammering away, and on the whole 
I kept steadily getting better. And when I 
went to New York a year afterwards, and went 
in to see the rather well-known nose and 
throat speciahst I always go to, he said the 
whole architecture of the inside of my head was 
improved." 

"Oh, you kept on going to a specialist, did 
you? Isn't it well yet, not after five years .^^" 
asked Emily, disappointed. 

"No, but it's well enough to be neghgible," 
said Sarah cheerfully. " I never bother suggest- 
ing at that old hay fever any more. — Oh, once 
or twice a season perhaps, if it gets bothersome. 
But for all practical pm-poses it's well, and 
has been, for about three years. Self-sugges- 
tion and the specialist together put it in its 
place. I should be bored to death going back 
to that nowadays! I suggest now mostly 
against cloudy thinking, and hackneyed, con- 



FOUNDATIONS 33 

ventional ways of writing, and against irrita- 
bility and selfishness, and the fear of death." 
"It sounds interesting," hazarded Mildred. 
"Go ahead and tell us more about the details 
of it. I don't suppose you begin right off after 
making up your accounts, or putting away the 
wash, to tell yourself to sleep restfully all 
night .^" 

Foundations 

"Well, no. I take a few minutes first for 
a little general preliminary thought, about the 
foundations of my life. Of course everybody 
else might not do it in just that way (although 
a great many saints and sinners in all ages 
seem to have found that way satisfactory). I 
don't think Dorothy and I do it the same way. 
But anyhow it's essentially the same principle 
we all use. 

"What I do first is to stretch out and rest 
and relax on my foundations, on what I beheve 
in, — well, why shouldn't I say it right out ? 
— on the thought of God. I concentrate my 
whole mind on the reahzation of God, for a 
minute or two, maybe five. I try to feel him; 
his greatness and power, or else his wholesome- 
ness and pleasantness, or, above all, his un- 
faihng interest in me and my affairs, £uid his 
sure readiness to back up any daring or ambi- 
tious project my conscience may have in view. 



34 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

And immediately I find myself rested, liixiu*iat- 
ing on the safety of the bed-rock that's under- 
neath everything in my life. You might almost 
call it what that old monk they had a revival 
of a year or two ago — yes, Brother Lawrence 
— what he called the * practise of the Presence.' 
Don't shy off Hke that, Mildred. You and 
Anna can stand it and Emily knows what I 
mean." 

Emily nodded, and said "Yes, I think I do." 

"Or you might call it taking a walk on the 
seashore, or in the biggest woods you know. 
Dorothy probably would. It's the one best 
way to rest, anyhow; go right down to what 
you really beheve in, the realest things you 
know, and stay there with them a little while." 

"What do you call ^real'?" demanded Anna. 

"Why, I think that's for everybody to decide 
for himself," rephed Sarah, drowning Emily's 
murmurous quotation, "The Actual is not the 
Real." "As I said, God is real to me. But 
you all try it for yourselves. Take a good look 
for your foundations and when you've found 
them, lean on them. If you beheve in God, 
lean on him. But you can't lean on what you 
don't really beheve in, and it'll never rest you 
a particle to try." 

"I've given up trying to persuade myself 
that I beheve in God," said Mildred, quietly. 
"I gave it up long ago." 



FOUNDATIONS 35 

"All right," said Sarah. " Find out what you 
do believe in, and rest on that." 

"Oh, I haven't taken up with any of these 
Oriental cults, or anything," said Mildred 
vaguely and rather wearily. 

"Mercy on us, woman! I didn't mean any- 
thing Hke that! I don't mean anything in a 
book or a series of lectures. I mean what you 
beheve in, yourself, — what you beheve in. 
Whatever your everyday hfe is founded on, it 
stands to reason you can found a Secret of 
Serenity on it too." 

Dorothy nodded. "That sounds like cold 
common sense to me," said she. 

"I doubt," said Anna dryly, "if you can get 
such good company as cold common sense to 
associate with those new-fangled notions of 
yours." 

Emily looked a little worried. "I'd just as 
soon not have everything so sensible!" she 
exclaimed. "Everybody wants everything so 
business-hke." 

This tickled Anna's sense of humor and put 
her into very good temper. She Ustened toler- 
antly, while Sarah went on expounding her 
scheme. 

" It's a little effort, that journey back to the 
foundations. Of course you have to use yom- 
mind and yoin* will-power quite vigorously 
before you can stop thinking about the unsatis- 



36 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

factory condition the laundry came home in, 
and the fact that the painter has not come to 
put the second coat on the windowsills, and 
concentrate your mind on something a Httle 
more permanent and important. Why, do 
you know, Dorothy, — Emily, — all of you — 
sometimes I've come home from our chm'ch 
fair, or the Band of Mercy picnic or the Alumni 
dinner at the Seminary so tired with thinking 
of details I thought I'd never get out of the 
ruck and confusion of them. It was the hard- 
est work to think of anything else but the pro- 
ceeds and the expenses and returning the tables 
and chairs and plates and napkins and turning 
off the electric Hght in the hallway and locking 
the side door and the cellar window of the 
parish house; or going all over again what a 
fright I'd had when I missed the Httlest Thomp- 
son boy at the picnic and some of the children 
said he'd run off to the river. Well, you all 
know how it is. You've all lain awake, I sup- 
pose, painfully wide awake, overtired. I 
declare sometimes it has seemed too much 
trouble to bundle all those ha'penny tup- 
penny anxieties out and make the effort that 
would rest me. I would think ' I'm too deadly 
tired to use the Secret tonight.' " 

"Nobody else can get a word in edgewise, 
now Sarah's off on her hobby, I suppose," 
said Anna. 



FOUNDATIONS 37 

"Let's go into this thing as deep as we can," 
urged Dorothy. "We've all thought about it 
enough, I'm sure. We'll never have a better 
chance to air our pet theories and adopt one 
another's if we want to." 

"Well, Hsten, — I want to finish." Sarah 
managed to insert herself again into the lead- 
ing place in the conversation. "As I say, you 
may often think you're too tired to do it, but 
if you use the muscles of your will a Httle bit, 
the rested feeling you get right away, instanta- 
neously, is perfectly indescribable. It's deh- 
cious! It makes you feel hke a child going to 
bed after a happy day, who knows his mother 
is sewing in the next room." 

"I'm not so fond of my own thoughts as all 
that!" Mildred demiu-red. "It might easily 
get to be unwholesome, I should think, all that 
self-centered thinking. I'd rather rest myself 
on Maeterlinck." 

"But Mildred, MaeterHnck won't do your 
beheving for you. What is your real founda- 
tion? I've got a theory about it myself. I 
believe it's the sense of beauty! Your whole 
life is such an honest workmanlike absorption 
in understanding beauty, and making other peo- 
ple understand it, in its highest forms, bring- 
ing it out as a chief end of education, making 
it increase and triumph in the minds of yoiu* 
httle boys and girls . . . my soul! what a 



38 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

splendid foundation! I should think you could 
rest on that, shouldn't you, Dorothy P Don't 
you all remember what Dorothy said in that 
last novel of hers, about keeping your life in 
drawing, keeping the color-scheme of yoiu* life 
harmonious; something like that?" 

"No," Mildred answered slowly, "that 
wouldn't do for me. My love for beauty would 
never connect with conduct. Life doesn't 
seem to me a kind of art. It is beautiful, even 
its most sorrowful and tragic parts, but I want 
it (if I could only have it so!) to be clear and 
intelligent and reasonable. I got very tired of 
beautiful paintings when I was in Italy, I 
remember. So often there wasn't any ade- 
quate plan, and the ruck of beautiful colors 
over my head in Santa Maria Maggiore almost 
drove me insane. Ten thousand lovely bits 
in twenty vaultings apiece, in twenty chapels! 
It was just such a kaleidoscope as the world is, 
and this life." 

Sarah began more soberly, "I guess then, 
your foundation isn't a sense of beauty, not 
the luxuriant Itahan sort of beauty at any rate. 
Greek, perhaps .^^ Beauty full of clearness of 
purpose, coherence, proportion ? Couldn't you 
rest on that ? The thought of ideal, austere 
beauty, the perfect, intelligent, purposeful, pro- 
portioned beauty! 'And beauty's law of plain- 
ness and content.'" 



FOUNDATIONS 39 

"Perhaps I could do something with the 
ideal of beauty. ... It does give me a notion 
of sohdity. I think I might get a sense of some- 
thing permanent out of that," Mildred mused 
aloud. 

They were all silent for several moments, 
until Dorothy exclaimed, "Let's dig down 
together, to all our respective foundations, right 
now. Come on, everybody! What are yours, 
Emily? What are yours, AnnaP" 

"Why, I beheve in God," said Emily, in a 
tone having in it the faintest possible shade of 
disapproval of the others. "I beheve in a 
personal God." 

"So do I," said Sarah, promptly, "I believe 
in a God who's the whole universe, crimes and 
all; and yet who always backs the right. I 
think he's everything we can imagine and a 
great deal more than we can imagine, and 
yet I think he's just like what the old- 
fashioned devotional books say, what the 
Bible says, a real human father, to the whole 
big family of us. And if these two ideas of 
him contradict each other, then I must do 
what Mr. Chesterton says the sane average 
person does; — take the two truths and the con- 
tradiction along with them. And so sometimes 
I think of him as the ocean, or the wind out of 
the pine woods, and sometimes I think of him 
almost hke a very much finer and greater Mr. 



40 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

TulKver, saying to us all, as Mr. Tulliver did 
to Maggie, when she was so sorry and ashamed 
about having cut off her hair, " Come over here 
and stand by me, little one. Father'U take 
your part." 

"Do you think of God as a human father 
too, Emily?" asked Dorothy. 

" I believe I do. My own father was always 
like a big stone wall between me and the world. 
I had such a feehng of safety if I could get 
where he was! If he went with me to the 
dentist's Fd have any number of teeth pulled. 
Even after I was married and had children 
of my own, I didn't lose that feeling about my 
father. And now I've grown to think of God 
very much in the same way." 

" I never had much of that feehng about my 
father, for all I loved him so dearly," said 
Dorothy. "Even as a very Httle girl, I knew 
perfectly well that I was the one who had to 
stand the pain of the tooth-pulHng, no matter 
who held my hand. And I feel that way now a 
good deal; that I must stand on my own feet 
and bear my own bmdens and have plain, 
sheer endurance for a daily ingredient in my 
hfe; and mustn't try to throw the responsibihty 
upon anybody else, — not even on God, — 
even if I had that personal idea of God, which 
I haven't at all, Hke Sarah and Emily. I 
haven't a bit of the mystic in me, you know, 



FOUNDATIONS 41 

and I get dizzy at the very idea of contempla- 
tion, the * practise of the Presence' that gives 
Sarah so much comfort. Trying to think of 
things in the abstract that way makes me feel 
as though I were leaning over the edge of a 
bottomless chasm and very hkely to lose my 
balance and fall in. So I never used even to 
try to discover what I did believe in, or what 
was the ultimate foundation of my Ufe. I 
used to depend entirely on what the Quakers 
call *the inner hght' (what the rest of us call 
conscience) and just try to do the best I could 
from day to day. You know the Quakers say 
that if you only listen quietly, your own heart 
will tell you what is right. I still steer my 
course mostly by that, even now. But a ques- 
tion of little Sally's brought home to me what 
that inner hght really means to me. Haven't 
you noticed," (she addressed the other mother), 
"how the children are always making you go 
to the heart of things ? Sally came to me one 
day when she was about four years old, with 
her great friend and playmate, LilHan. She 
said * Mother, what is God ? Lilhan says he's 
an old man with a white beard who hves up 
on top of Red Mountain and looks down at 
us.' 

"Well, there I was, face to face with the 
question I'd been dodging all my hfe. Sally 
looked up at me confidently and I had to 



42 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

answer. And in trying to make it simple 
enough for a fom'-year-old child to understand, 
I made it, for the first time, simple enough so 
that I could understand. I said right away as 
though I'd had that answer ready for years, 
*Why, Httle daughter, I think that God is the 
feehng in our hearts that makes us want to do 
what's right. I think when we want to be good 
to other people instead of tormenting and 
harming them, we have God in us. Goodness 
and bravery and unselfishness — those are 
other names for God.' 

"And ever since then I've reahzed that I 
trust the inner fight because I really befieve, 
even in my blackest moments, that there is 
something immortal and eternal in it. For all 
that it's so often corrupted and obscured with 
bigotry and self-interest (I suppose the best 
of the Inquisitors were following their inner 
fight!) I do befieve in it. I don't befieve very 
emphatically in many things because ' the world 
and all that in it is ' seems to me in such a state 
of flux and confusion; but I discovered then 
that I do befieve, very emphatically, and in 
all my moods, that there is something in human 
nature far beyond the instincts to feed and 
propagate and possess." 

Several of the others, while Dorothy spoke, 
had nodded once or twice as if in unconscious 
agreement. Anna herself had looked unusually 



FOUNDATIONS 43 

thoughtful, though she now said rather shortly, 
"Well, as far as I'm concerned, the less I think 
about what I beHeve, the better. The more I 
think about it, the more it dwindles away." 

"'When half-gods go . . .'" began Emily, 
who had an insatiable habit of quoting. 

"No gods at all arrive to me," Anna finished, 
mordantly. "No use being optimistic about 
it. For a long time I tried to think I beHeved 
in *a Power not ourselves that makes for 
righteousness.'" 

"Well, that's enough, I should think," 
exclaimed the temperamentally sanguine Sarah. 

Without noticing, Anna went on, "At first I 
spelled it with a capital, and then without. But 
it disintegrated, either way, and disappeared 
without leaving a single trace behind." 

She paused, and then went on. "I've been 
sitting here all this time Hstening to what you 
folks all believe in, as if it were a kind of dia- 
lect you were talking; a dialect I didn't under- 
stand. All I can really sense is a tremendous 
feeling of responsibihty, a feeling of burdens 
being the proper thing to bear, and that it is 
up to me to bear them." 

Dorothy unostentatiously took the great 
liberty of pressing for an instant Anna's hand. 
She knew what some of the burdens had 
been. 

"I was brought up, Hke the rest of you, to 



44 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

be perfectly orthodox," Anna proceeded. "/ 
don't know where it's all gone! It's melted, 
scattered, blown off somewhere. I've even 
given up trying to find a principle Uke Mil- 
dred's. I've got absolutely nothing left but a 
dogged unwillingness to fool myself." 

She ceased abruptly, and before Sarah could 
bring her thoughts to the definiteness of speech, 
Dorothy had exclaimed, cheerfully, "Well, 
Anna, there you are. What a splendid granite 
foundation!" 

"What!" cried Anna. 

"Why, honesty, rock-ribbed, uncompromis- 
ing honesty of behef! It rests me to the 
marrow of my bones just to think of it." 

Sarah added eagerly, "Rest the whole weight 
of your Hfe on it, this very night, Anna, do! 
Just concentrate every atom of your mind on 
the imperishable strength of honesty! I think, 
with no less a person than Spinoza, that it's 
immortahty itself to hold a behef hke that." 

"Well, — but look here! You two tran- 
scendentalists have snatched it out of my hand 
and turned on the colored lights, somehow. 
All I had in mind was just what I've learned 
out of every-day business experience; that's 
all. I've learned by a thousand experiences 
with new hands, old hands, green, blundering, 
smart, conceited, — oh, everything, every kind 
of human there is (for they all come into my 



FOUNDATIONS 45 

office in the course of time), that there's ex- 
actly one thing you can tie to, and nothing else 
in the entire world, and that is honesty." 

"Well, that's what you want to tie to, then," 
Mildred added her assent to what Sarah and 
Dorothy had said. 

"But — why! . . . How is tliis, anyway P" 
asked Anna, bewildered. "I never thought of 
it as a principle . . . never as a kind of phi- 
losophy ! It's just experience, and only business 
experience at that!" 

"Any reason why it couldn't be granite, just 
because the quarry's in your own pasture?" 
asked Dorothy energetically. She went on, 
" I think Anna's foundation underlies all that's 
best in the nineteenth century. That unspar- 
ing, austere faith in intellectual integrity, 
that perfect trust in honesty no matter where 
it leads you, — without that not a single step 
towards the strength and splendor of modern 
science would have been taken. It began, 
didn't it, with Bacon's * Novum Organum,' — 
one of the greatest minds of all times being 
needed to conceive it in the first place! And 
now it has spread and spread till it's the bul- 
wark behind which innumerable modern lives 
are sheltering themselves from the void. That 
habit of mind, so widely acquired, — it's the 
great springboard off which I expect the 
twentieth century to jump to goodness knows 



46 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

what shining new certainties. I can hardly 
wait to get a glimpse of them." 

"Why, but I never ... I can't get it 
through my head, quite. . . . When I began 
to talk about it, I didn't suppose I was on the 
track of anything like thisV Anna subsided 
into astonished contemplation of the mine she 
had uncovered, beginning from time to time 
exclamations of amazement and increduhty. 
. . . "Trying to make my ugly duckhng out 
a swan!" 

The others too were silent for some time, in 
spite of a few spasmodic false starts back to 
conversation. Perhaps each woman was asking 
herseK how adequately or how inadequately she 
had stated the case for her own beUef, thinking 
of shades of meaning she hadn't brought out, 
and impUcations she was doubtful of being 
able to stand by all the way through. 

At length Emily dissipated all these thoughts 
by the sudden demand, "Well, when you've 
got thoroughly rested, what then, Sarah .^" 

Drawing Checks on the Subconscious Forces 

"Well, then, of course, you begin on the 
other part. You go to market and supply your- 
self with what you need. It may be a sweeter 
disposition, it may be self-confidence under an 
expected strain, it may be freedom from the 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 47 

sense of hurry, or more success in being com- 
panionable; or it may be the courage of your 
convictions and a little more boldness in living 
up to them." 

"Well, but what do you do and how do you 
doit?" asked Mildred. 

"I forgot to say that in the beginning you 
lie down, or else you lean back in a comfort- 
able chair, and it's just as well to darken the 
room a httle, if you can. (Anything that con- 
duces to quiet nerves and relaxation.) Sleep- 
ing porches are good places to do it in. When 
you've thought about your foundations long 
enough, and that dehcious feehng of rest that 
such thinking always brings comes over you, 
you concentrate your attention on what you 
want, and use yoiu* will-power to draw it out 
of the subconscious storehouse you have the 
keys to. For instance, let's suppose you want 
relief from the apprehensive habit of mind 
so many of us — perhaps women particularly 
— are so tormented by, — the habit of looking 
for all sorts of small trouble. You say to 
yourself something Hke this, 

" All you good-for-nothing small fears and cares, 
I rake you up like a parcel of dry leaves; 
I rake you into a heap, 
I touch a match to you! 
Blaze up, blaze away, dead leaves 1 
And crumble down into ashes. 



48 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

The wind cheerfully blows them away 
And scatters them over a thousand miles." 



Mildred murmured, "Oh, heavens! if I could 
only get rid of them as easily as that!" 

"Lots of people have got rid of them as 
easily as that," Sarah maintained. "Only — 
it's not easy! it's no lazy woman's job to spend 
fifteen minutes to half an hour a day patiently 
and toilfuUy concentrating your mind on that 
form of words and others hke it; — for they 
don't last very long, only about a week or ten 
days; and when one begins to lose its sharp- 
ness and brightness of outHne, it's time to make 
up a new one." 

"I never could make one up in the world," 
cried Emily. 

"Well, you don't have to," said Dorothy. 
"I never use that kind of thing, never could. 
But I have a storehouse of fine quotations 
that do the same thing for me, just give me 
a jolt and get my eyes back into right focus, 
like looking off into the distance after you've 
been straining your eyes over fine needlework. 
If I were in that state of mind Sarah speaks 
of I should give myself a good laugh with 
that thing from Emerson, how Nature greets 
us as we come busthng from the caucus or 
the committee meeting, *Why so hot, little 
man?'" 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 49 

"But you're mistaken about not being able 
to make up definite forms of suggestion for 
yourself, Emily ! " cried Sarah. " Of course you 
could. And I think you're probably one of 
that large class whom they'd help ever so much. 
You'd soon discover that you could make a 
great deal better ones for yourself than any 
printed ones you can find." 

"Some of yours, Sarah, are really just good 
vers litres,'' declared Dorothy, "and I've got 
some of those in my quotation treasury." 

Sarah insisted, "I feel that nobody but 
yourself can say exactly what you want to 
say and say it in just the way you want it. 
Grammar and rhetoric and all those things 
don't matter at all. The only point is, does 
it suit you? Does it work.^ You shouldn't 
have them too long, of course, or too compli- 
cated. The efi'ect needs to be simple and 
strong." 

"Have you entirely given up using it for 
physical help? " asked Emily. " I don't suppose 
you come down to that any more." 

"Indeed I do, though I" said Sarah, "when- 
ever I need it. I just happen not to need it 
much. But it seems to me the whole of fife is 
team-play anyway. (* Soul helps flesh and flesh 
helps soul.') That old monkish medieval idea 
that's so attractive to people who are naturally 
ascetic, about the body's being something 



50 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

beneath our notice, seems to me just as absm^d 
and wrong-headed and thick-headed as any- 
thing can possibly be! Why, of course you 
draw on the subconscious reservoir for more 
physical strength whenever you want it — 
for cahnness and quiet nerves under an opera- 
tion, for instance; or in ordinary, every-day 
life, for sounder sleep, reKef from headache, 
and so forth. It's particularly useful for people 
in that discouraged period of recovery from a 
serious illness. You know how buoyant they 
are when they first sit up. Every day they sit 
up a fit tie longer; and then comes the grand 
event of being entirely dressed and walking 
across the hall into the spare room. And then 
comes on that disheartened time that wears 
out the family worse than the crisis itself did. 
The convalescent can't see that he's going on 
at all! He'll never get his strength back at 
this rate ! If he could only walk to the corner ! " 

"That's exactly where my oldest boy is now, 
after pneumonia," exclaimed Emily. *'Hell 
try your Secret! He'd try anything, if he 
thought it would get him back to Princeton 
in the fall!" 

"Well, if he'll go to sleep every night saying 
this over, putting his mind on it hard, I'm 
pretty sure it'll help him," answered Sarah. 
" It's an old favorite of mine. 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 51 

** Sail, ship of health, 
On the homeward voyage 
Through storm and calm, 
Plough the deep water. 
Steadily the ship comes 
Nearer and nearer, 
Steadfastly steaming 
Through north wind and south wind 
And east wind and west wind, 
Steaming and ploughing straight home." 

Emily said, "I wish you'd write that down, 
ni take it home." 

"She's got it written down already," said 
Dorothy. "She has a lot of them written 
out in a little note-book. See here, Sarah, while 
I'm serving tea (we're going to have it at five 
today) won't you run back to the house and 
bring that note-book over here.^ I know Emily- 
would hke to see them. And perhaps the others 
too. I don't use them the way you do, but I 
read them as I read your verses." 

"All right," agreed Sarah, "I'll show my 
note-book, if you'll go up to your study and 
bring down that assorted collection of fine 
sayings you find so suggestive." 

Mildred asked, "You say lots of people have 
really hastened their convalescence by that 
kind of thing .^" 

"Certainly they have; and by the way that's 
something I wanted to say at the very beginning. 



52 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

You ought always to keep in the back of your 
mind, every time you suggest to yoiu'self, the 
fact that lots and lots of people have worked 
it successfully, and if you are as persevering 
and energetic as they are, you'll certainly work 
it successfully too." 

"You don't mean by that, though, do you, 
Sarah," Dorothy asked, "that you claim to 
ciue everything by self-suggestion? Because 
if you do, I'm going to climb right off your 
wagon this minute." 

"Well, you'll find me climbing right down 
beside you," said Sarah laughing. "Nobody 
has a profounder respect and admiration than 
I for the glorious achievements of doctors and 
nurses and hospitals and camps and fresh air 
and cleanHness and exercise. All along the 
line body and soul work together, it seems to 
me. I think we ought to declare war on the 
spirit of exclusiveness, hydra that it is, when- 
ever it sticks up one of its ugly heads. Only 
I'm sure that there are a good many other 
people just the way I used to be. Whenever 
they go to a doctor, down they sink as hmp 
as a rag into the office chair, and wait there 
Uke a lump of putty to be put into shape. 
They are millstones round any self-respecting 
doctor's neck, and I know a few trained nurses 
well enough to know they hang the same way 
on a niu'se; especially those who can afford to 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 53 

keep a nurse indefinitely. Well, as I told you, 
I was thirty years old before I ever found out 
that I had a fine Httle tonic right in the house, 
that I could administer to myself. No sooner 
had I begun using it than I was perfectly 
astonished to find how often it was the only 
medicine in the world I needed." 

"I didn't mean only that," Dorothy ex- 
plained. "I meant that there are deep waters 
we must wade through, that no secrets of 
serenity will save us from. Deep and real 
anxieties must be borne, and weakness and 
illness and sorrow, partings and pain and loss 
and loneliness. We can't be always walking, 
as old Bunyan said, in our silver sHppers in 
the sunshine. Just to live under the present 
industrial system, with its idiotic waste and 
brutahty, is enough make any modern brain 
curdle with indignation and exasperation." 

"But that's exactly where some such Secret 
as ours is needed most of all," cried Sarah in 
eager haste. "That's just why we need all 
our strength. When you have to go step by 
step through the hardest kind of rough coun- 
try, when you have to wade against the strong- 
est current, that's the time, above all other 
times, when you need to lean hardest on your 
own real faith, and to reahze it most. That's 
the time to call out every ounce of power you've 
got, to keep on, and keep steady, and see the 



54 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

thing through. Intolerable burdens of pity 
and sympathy, intolerable indignation, such as 
this war places on us all, — forebodings that 
are only too reasonable, and inescapable, slow- 
coming-on calamities; — they are the situa- 
tions that call the loudest for strength beyond 
our ordinary strength, and they are the situa- 
tions when it's most available." 

" Give us a preventive, then, " said Anna in 
a colorless voice, "against old age." 

"Against the fear of it, you mean, of course. 
All right. Here's one I used last year when I 
got so blue over the fact that I was thirty-six 
and starting down the shady side towards the 
seventies. 

" Come, Captain Age, 

With your great sea-chest full of treasure! 

Under the yeUow and wrinkled tarpaulin 

Disclose the carved ivory 

And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl; 

Riches of wisdom and years. 

Unfold the India shawl 

With the border of emerald and orange and crimson 

and blue, 
Weave of a lifetime! 
I shall be warm and splendid 
With the spoils of the Indies of Age." 

"That's very pretty! You just say it over 
three or four times, I suppose," Mildred con- 
jectured. 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 55 

"Three times, or even two, ought to be 
enough, if you concentrate with the most 
intense preoccupation on every one of the 
important words. (Some people, by the way, 
can think without words.) It takes a long time, 
of course, to do that." 

" Exactly what do you mean by concentrate ? " 
asked Dorothy. "For me it only means stop- 
ping on each idea till I have fully taken in all 
the meaning there is in it." 

"Why yes, that's what I mean. Concentrate 
on the idea of the word — not the letters of it!" 

"Fm afraid I should just be spelhng it over 
and over," Emily said. 

"But you mustn' t ! " Sarah exclaimed. * * You 
must make yourself think of the idea. You 
must keep at it till you do. And of course 
you have to keep bringing your mind back 
over and over again ..." 

"I was just going to ask," said Anna, with a 
shghtly ironical air, "how you expect these 
mothers and housewives Hke Dorothy and 
Emily here to get half an hour a day without 
interruptions. All very well for us single 
women . . ." 

Dorothy broke in, "Interruptions don't 
matter! As far as that goes, the very worst 
of all interruptions come from the inside, and 
they're always certain to come. Starts of 
recollection, * Heavens! did you shut off the 



56 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

furnace draughts? Where did you put the 
grocer's sUps? Mustn't forget to write that 
letter to so-and-so the first thing in the 
morning. ..." 

"I suppose," remarked Mildred in an elabo- 
rately dreamy tone, "you put the furnace 
draughts out of your mind and let the house 
burn up if necessary." 

Dorothy gave her vigorous shout, "Well, I 
guess not! You get right out from your easy 
chair or tumble off the lounge and go straight 
down to the furnace, but you don't have to 
stop thinking hopefully about the thoughtful 
serenity of old age, while you are going." 

"And you needn't hurry back even if you do 
hurry down," said Sarah. "You can come up 
the cellar stairs slowly and think as you come. 
Now about the grocer's slips, and the letter to 
be written the first thing in the morning, the 
best thing to do with those is to turn them over 
to the same subconscious confidential clerk 
that watches Anna's clock all the time she's 
asleep and wakes her up according to the order 
she has given, at a quarter to seven in the 
morning. You just say with a tranquil con- 
fidence, * Remind me of this at the proper time, 
please,' and having settled it, go on to your 
suggestion." 

"How much can you let your imagination 
out.^^" asked Emily. 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 57 

"A good deal ; in fact, all you like. When you 
command, or will (for that's the most ener- 
getic moment of the whole affair), you may like 
to think of yourself rolhng a heavy stone up 
over the crest of a hill, or riding a horse across 
country leading a troop of rough-riders. And 
then again on another day, you may like better 
just to think of the naked moral force of the 
will, and feel it stiffen, brace and build up your 
mind and heart and body." 

"Can't you all guess what Zephine would 
say to that if she were here?" exclaimed Mil- 
dred, referring to a sixth friend, who since 
her marriage and removal to a neighboring 
town, had frequently been unable to meet with 
the others. Zephine was a woman of keen and 
dehcate perceptions and of a mystical devo- 
tional spirit, to whom the traditional forms of 
religion were far more full of meaning than they 
were to any of the others. 

"Zephine would say," Dorothy promptly 
answered, "that she didn't see why Sarah 
doesn't just kneel down and pray." 

"So she would!" exclaimed Sarah. "And 
I'm ever so glad you spoke of that, Mildred, 
because I think myself that the Hne between 
suggestion and prayer is rather a shadowy 
one. Before I began suggesting, though, while 
I used to pray very behevingly, I never felt 
the bracing challenge to self-reliance that sug- 



58 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

gestion gives, and that a weak-kneed party like 
me needs so badly. Perhaps you might call 
it a very active and self-helpful form of prayer." 

Anna shook her head. 

"Zephine wouldn't pray to her own subcon- 
scious self," she said shortly. 

"That's true, too," assented Sarah, smiling 
with the others. " Very likely Zephine wouldn't 
care about that particularizing, definite part at 
all. She would be contented with throwing 
herself on the thought of God, and resting 
there. She would begin just as I do, probably, 
laying the whole weight of her life on her faith 
in God. . . ." 

"And she'd end there," said Dorothy with 
conviction. 

"No — I don't beheve she would end there," 
Emily, who knew her best, said firmly. "I 
think she would go on and pray for what 
she specifically wanted, just as anybody would. 
Only I don't think she'd do it at all the way 
Sarah does, or at all according to Dorothy's 
ideas." 

"I wish," said Sarah, "you'd tell us all you 
can about Zephine's mental attitude in prayer. 
She wouldn't mind, I'm sure — I never knew 
anybody more unaffectedly frank in talking 
about rehgious things. And I feel that we 
need to get light on this discussion from the 
mystically rehgious temperament, such as 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 59 

Zephine's. If you'll tell us all you can, it'll 
be the next thing to having her here to tell us 
for herself." 

"Well, you see, to begin with," began Emily, 
a little awed at taking the egoistic Sarah's place 
in the center of the discussion, "I'm sure she 
doesn't make that effort of the will you talk 
about. I think she becomes as passive as possi- 
ble when she prays. She 'neither strives nor 
cries.' And do you know, she told me once that 
whenever she prayed for anything, she always 
had to give it up, in good faith, too, — give up 
all hopes of it, — before it would ever be given 
to her. And then — it often was given." 

"Books about self-suggestion," Sarah mused 
aloud, "often advise — in fact they sometimes 
insist upon — that passive state. It must suit 
a great many people; but then again, there 
must be a great many others, Hke me, who 
feel, as Milton says, * unexercised and un- 
breathed' unless they call out their will-power 
to put its shoulder to the wheel. 

"It just goes to show, doesn't it, what rich- 
ness and variety there is in life ! as much variety 
in spiritual things as there is in material ones, — 
as much, did I say ? Of course there must be a 
great deal more! To me," concluded Sarah, 
"it seems as plain as day that it's one and the 
same power Zephine and Dorothy and I all 
use; and that 'inside ourselves' and 'outside 



60 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

ourselves' are probably just our ignorant ways 
of talking about it." 

" I was just going to ask, when you all went 
off talking about Zephine, how many treat- 
ments — suggestions — whatever you call them 
— how many you can be giving yourself at a 
time? Or isn't there any limit?" inquired 
Mildred with some curiosity. 

"Why, it seems to me all anybody can use 
at once would be one for the body and one for 
the character. You can use both at the same 
session, first one and then the other — turn 
and turn about. The physical ones are rather 
stupid, of course, compared with the others." 

"By the way, one or two of Sarah's recipes 
actually turned into magazine verses. Did 
you all know that?" asked Dorothy. 

"Which, for instance?" Mildred inquired 
with interest. 

"Why, there was one in the Atlantic, last 
fall or winter, wasn't it ? Say it for us, Sarah." 

"Why, I just wrote out what I'd been using 
to quiet myself when I'd been thinking too 
much about the war. This is it. 

THE ANODYNE 

" In the late evening, when the house is still, 
For an intense instant, 

I Uft my clean soul out of the soiled garments of 
mortality. 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 61 

No sooner is it free to rise than it bends back earth- 
ward 

And touches mortal Ufe with hands Uke the hands 
that troubled the waters of Bethesda. 

So this incorruptible touches the corrupt; 

This immortal cools with a touch 

The beaded forehead of mortahty." 

"That's in my collection of quotations," 
said Dorothy. "That's a form that even I can 
use, little as I like forms. Let's have the 
'Lookout' too," she went on, with her usual 
partial estimate of Sarah's verses. *'They 
were printed together." 

"All right. It's a little like your * inner 
light,' I think, Dorothy. 

THE LOOKOUT 

" Imperious Self beyond self that I call my soul, 

Climb up into the crow's nest. 

Look out over the changing waters of my life 

And shout down to me whither to change my course. 

Warn me of the reefs and bergs; 

Warn me well of the mirages I 

No, I cannot release you, you cannot rest; 

There is no one I can trust in your place." 

"Why, Sarah, I really like those very much!" 
said Mildred heartily. "You don't mind, do 
you, if I ask you perfectly straight out, why 
you repeat them so slowly and monotonously V 



62 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

"Well, just because that way suits me best 
and puts me quickest into a sleepy, fixed state 
of mind, and helps me to hold the ideas motion- 
less before my attention, until they fog and I 
drift off from them, something the way you 
do in a hot church, you know, on a cold winter 
morning." 

"Do you want to get drowsy doing it? 
Doesn't it spoil it to doze off? I don't see, 
anyway, how concentration can put you to 
sleep. And I should think you'd repeat them 
more expressively," said Emily. 

"It does, though," maintained Sarah stoutly; 
"concentration on quiet thoughts does put you 
to sleep. You don't want to repeat it for an 
audience, you know, hke an elocutionist. 
What you want to do is to hold the main ideas, 
one after another, so long and still and firmly 
in your mind that at last it fairly fills up and 
overflows with them. Yes, you want to get 
sleepy if you can. That cKnches it all the 
more, solders it into the brain." 

Dorothy said, "Do you know, Sarah, I very 
often don't go to sleep, though. I'm very apt 
to do it when I'm walking down to Arhngton, 
or strawberrying, or getting greens, or going 
nutting." 

"I suppose everybody would have his or 
her own ideas about that," Sarah conceded. 
"Whatever time and place seemed most con- 



SUBCONSCIOUS FORCES 63 

venient and congenial. When I was living in 
East Orange and coming into New York often 
for the day, I used to suggest on those roaring 
Lackawanna trains, on the way home. I 
used to have quite a struggle sometimes, too, 
not to buy an evening paper when I saw other 
commuters getting aboard with scare head- 
hnes about Mexico and the big strikes I was 
absorbedly interested in. But generally I 
persevered and spent the half-hour from Ho- 
boken to the Oranges in a perfectly dehcious 
sail back into serenity. There's something 
soothing about the monotonous roar of the 
train, and the vibration is like a cradle when 
you come to think of it. Commuters have a 
splendid chance to do this kind of thing. I 
remember one elderly man I used to see doing 
it. I'm sure he was. He had that miles-away- 
focused look in his eyes. And there was 
another, a young fellow who always came out 
on the five-fifty. I used to look at him and 
bet myself a cookie he was doing it too." 

"Well, I still don't see any reason for all 
this picking and choosing of places and times 
to do it in," objected Anna. "As I said in 
the beginning, if you and Dorothy have got 
hold of a Secret, if you know how to five per- 
fectly beautiful fives without a wrinkle ..." 

She was interrupted by Dorothy's shout of 
whole-hearted laughter. 



64 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

"Well, my point's perfectly clear,'* insisted 
Anna, unaccountably mollified. "If you've 
got the pot of gold, why can't you use it all 
the time ? Why special horn's and places and 
moods ? All that coddhng of yourself! Why 
not just briskly stop having headaches and 
stop worrying, and as I said, be perfectly well 
and perfectly happy once for all?" 

"Nobody said it was easy and simple. ..." 
Sarah burst out in a nettled tone. 

But at the same moment Dorothy began 
more peaceably, "Well, don't you think, after 
all, that the element of external preparation 
and right setting, is more or less a matter of 
temperament ? Most people feel more rehgious 
in a beautiful church with stained-glass win- 
dows than in a railway station. Most people 
can eat a better meal at a fresh, clean, well-set 
table than grabbing their food out of a clutter 
on the pantry shelf, — even the very same food. 
Most people probably can sooner lift them- 
selves out of triviaUties up to a higher mood in 
some quiet place, without much light, and in a 
physically relaxed condition. But if there are 
people strong-minded enough to pray as well 
while buying a ticket to Chicago and eat as well 
in an untidy kitchen and call out their better 
selves for active service in the midst of a talk 
with the dressmaker . . . why, let 'em, I say! 
I envy them! But most of us need some exter- 



THE DIAGNOSIS PLAN 65 

nal helps. And don't let the strong-minded, 
like Anna, grudge them to those who do." 

"I don't suppose, anyhow," Mildred com- 
mented musingly, "that's an essential point for 
either you or Sarah?" 

The Diagnosis Plan 

"Essential — no, for of course surround- 
ings, in the nature of things, can't be essentials. 
What does seem essential to me, though," 
Dorothy continued, "is a clear diagnosis of 
what's wrong with me, before I undertake to 
set it right. I don't really see how anybody 
can call up his best strength and send it out to 
do battle unless he knows what he's fighting 
against. If I were going to advise a serious- 
minded young person beginning hfe with a 
serious purpose of making a success of it, I'd 
tell him to spend some quiet time every day 
in a mental laboratory, fussing around with 
moral test-tubes and spiritual acid-tests, ana- 
lyzing what goes on inside him. That's how I 
spend a good part of my quiet half-hour a day 
— when I can get it to spend — caUing my 
own bluff, so to speak." 

"Oh, but that's introspection V cried Anna, 
damning the process by her accent. 

"WeU, I never could see," said Dorothy some- 
what combatively, "why under the sun we are 



66 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

convinced of the necessity for frequently in- 
specting our household drains and the diges- 
tions of our children and the state of the sheets 
and pillow-cases and whether the rose-bushes 
need hellebore, and are afraid to inspect what's 
going on inside our heads and hearts. For my 
part I frequently find myself more in need of 
a figurative hanging-out-on-the-Hne, th£ui any 
rug in the house." 

"But how can you inspect what's going on 
inside your mind?" inquired Emily with her 
sweet and slightly melancholy accent. "I 
know I feel horribly sad and depressed very 
often, but that's as far as I can go." 

"You don't just say you know you have head- 
aches very often, do you, and let it go at that ? 
You know nobody has headaches without some 
reason. You try first one diagnosis and then 
another. You wonder if it's not the mince pie 
last night, or if perhaps coffee isn't good for 
you, or maybe you need your glasses changed. 
Then, having made a guess at the causes, you 
try to remove them. You give up coffee, or 
you go to the oculist, or you try going for a 
month without pie. Why don't you apply 
the same reasoning for that indefinable dead 
weight of depression that troubles you? You 
might trace it back, dignified as it seems, to 
nothing more formidable than too tight shoes, 
or a fear that that competent cook of yours has 



THE DIAGNOSIS PLAN 67 

a young man and may leave you, or that your 
waist measure is two inches bigger than it was 
last year. Honestly, a lot of Weltschmerz 
isn't a real doubt of the goodness of the world, 
but a subconscious squirm of wounded vanity 
over the poor showing you made in presiding 
over a club meeting last week. Here, let me 
give an example out of my own experience, 
though it's anything but creditable to me. The 
other day when I sat down for my quiet half- 
hour of thinking things over, I brought before 
the bar a wretched, teasing uneasiness that 
had kept me in low spirits all day long. It 
had colored everything; had made me think 
Jimmy's cold was certainly worse, that Sally's 
spelling never would improve, and that my 
writing was absolutely no good at all. By 
nightfall it had put on a fine dark mantle of 
poetic gloom. 'What was the world, what was 
fife, that we should make such a bother about 
them?' I asked myself. . . . 

"Well, when I dragged it out and looked at 
it squarely, what do you suppose I found the 
old thing really was ? Anita WilHams, talking 
about their new car, had said that of course 
they had to get an expensive one because their 
oldest boy had said he'd rather walk any day 
than ride in a Ford. And then she said, *0h, 
there! I forgot all about yours being a Ford. 
You don't mind, do you.^' 



68 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

"I had laughed out loudly, really a genuine 
laugh with all the top of my brain highly 
amused at the idea of my caring what that 
whippet of a Jim WilUams thought about 
Ford cars, and I had used the same top of my 
brain to philosophize wonderingly about the 
inexpKcable prejudice of the American people 
against the Ford car and to hope that it didn't 
indicate such an incurable national vulgarity 
as it seemed to. But there's a lot more to a 
person than the top of her brain. There's 
a whole lumpish mass of soft, fat, ignoble 
prejudices and desires, inherited perhaps from 
ancestors scattered through the generations 
who did care awfully what silly whippets of 
boys thought, who cared awfully what anybody 
thought, who hardly cared for anything else 
except what other people thought, and who 
lived, almost consciously lived, only to excite 
envy in others. 

"We're told we have to pay for everything, 
and I suppose we pay for all that wonderful 
subconscious strength that Sarah's always 
leaning on, by this malevolent subconscious 
inheritance from very low-browed ancestors. 
Well, into that broad target of unconscious, 
inherited standards, Jim WilHams's silly little 
arrow had buried itself to the head, and all 
day I had gone about conscious of something 
wrong, but entirely unwilling to look myself 



THE DIAGNOSIS PLAN 69 

honestly over and see what it was. I'll make 
a writer's confession to you. I'd written out 
of that mood of depression one of the strongest 
descriptions of melanchoHa that my feeble 
pen has ever turned out. Of course when I 
went back reasonably over the day, step by 
step, I soon foimd out what the matter was, 
and wasn't I chagrined! I made that high- 
falutin top of my brain come down off its 
perch, I tell you, and I made it stop comparing 
French and English Gothic for a minute and 
get right down to work and be of some practical 
use to me. It snatched that absurd, childish, 
unworthy feehng and threw it out of the win- 
dow, double-quick. Yes, literally out of the 
window. I often throw such a thing out of the 
window, out into the blackness where the stars 
shrivel it up and the night-wind blows it away 
to be trampled into dust by honest people's 
feet, as it deserves to be. Do you know, after 
I had found that sUver stuck into my vanity 
and pulled it out, I had an actual physical 
sense of relaixation, as you do when you finally 
get a rose-thorn out of your finger." 

Sarah said to the others, "You see, that isn't 
a bit the way I do it. Dorothy's zestful de- 
fight in the workings of her analytical mind 
would be thin comfort to me. And yet essen- 
tially the habit's the same. What we both do 
is to try to measure our small affairs on the 



70 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

scale of the permanent, dignified, real values 
of life, and the exact way we handle that scale 
doesn't matter. Dorothy particularizes first, 
sees just where she stands and just what her 
mistakes have been and just what fine elements 
of strength and courage and cheer she needs 
to call into her life; whereas I don't bother to 
look at every dirty spot on the floor before I 
scrub it. I just flood it all with cleansing soap 
and water. And yet, you know, Dorothy's 
plan works just about the way mine does in 
the end." 

"Does it always work, Dorothy .^^" asked 
Mildred. 

Dorothy was moved to a burst of her rather 
boisterous laughter at the idea. "Of course it 
doesn't always. What does.^ But it helps, 
Hke anything. Do you know what I think of 
every time I see a hen fluttering and squawk- 
ing along in front of my car, so frantic with 
hen-headedness that she can't for the hfe of 
her remember that all she has to do is to step 
quietly over on the grass at the side of the road 
in order to be perfectly happy and safe ? Every 
squawk she gives, every unnecessary flap of 
her wings, shows me what I do with my life, 
half the time. I get so tangled up with triviali- 
ties I can't collect my mind enough to remember 
that most of them don't matter in the least. 
What I use my quiet half-hour for is to make 



THE DIAGNOSIS PLAN 71 

myself remember that nothing in the world 
but my own fooHshness keeps me from stopping 
my hurrying, breathless, pelting scramble and 
going along, most of the time, peacefully and 
tranquilly, through green pastures by still 
waters." 

"All the same, she never does forget the most 
important, most essential things," persisted 
Sarah, whose almost fiercely high estimate 
of her friend always moved honest Anna to 
tip the balance in the other direction with a 
jerk perhaps more energetic than was strictly 
necessary to scientific equilibrium. 

"Yes, she does too, forget the important 
things," Anna declared stoutly; "she forgets 
to have her china closet cleaned out as often 
as it ought to be; she forgets to keep her 
sewing-room in order; she forgets to hem 
dish-towels; I saw one in her kitchen today, 
hanging up as big as life with both ends as 
rough as the day the clerk cut it off the bolt, 
— and she forgets to get hair ribbons for 
Sally. ..." 

"But she doesn't forget Sally's bedtime 
story," suggested Emily softly. "She doesn't 
forget to have her children go to sleep with 
some sweet uplifting thought about ..." 

Dorothy wriggled uncomfortably and looked 
cross. There were moments when Emily's 
gentle sag towards sentimentalism roused in 



72 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

her something of Anna's harsh and unintelli- 
gent irritation. Moments of feeling thus 
towards Emily made her understand with 
amused vividness Anna's frequent irritation 
with her and her unhemmed dish-towels and 
her fine ideas. 



The Wholesomeness of Primitive Earthy 
Elements in Life 

"Oh, I think there can easily be too much 
sweet upHftingness in children's hves," she 
said, almost roughly. "I think there can easily 
be too much of it in anybody's Hfe, especially 
morally self-conscious people. We're awfully 
complex creatures, all of us, and it takes all 
kinds of elements to keep us well-nourished 
mentally and spiritually as well as physically. 
That's one of the things I often do in what I 
call my evening diagnosis of the day, — try 
to see if it's had a balanced ration. You know 
we've all been trained, for about a generation, 
by our good domestic science instruction, to 
consider carefully whether we are giving our 
families and ourselves enough protein or car- 
bohydrates or whatever. We often say in 
reviewing the day, 'Now, that dinner was too 
exclusively starchy. I must make tomorrow's 
soup of lentils, and be sure we have a fruit 
dessert.' But we don't often enough say, 



PRIMITIVE EARTHY ELEMENTS 73 

at least I don't, *Why, here is a whole day 
gone by without one hearty laugh heard in 
this house! The children must have some 
charades after dinner tomorrow evening.' Or, 
*It's a week, I declare, since we've had any 
music! I must get out my fiddle tomorrow and 
we'll have a sing.' Or even, *Now we've been 
all slopping around, camp-fashion, in Idiaki 
and middy blouses and overalls. I believe it 
would do us all good to dress up om* prettiest 
for dinner tomorrow and have shaded candles 
on the table.' Or perhaps the other way about, 
'I've just been pestering the life out of the 
children about keeping their clothes clean! 
Now I'm going to let them have one good big 
dose of freedom, and be as Hvely as they 
please with no reproaches for a day or so, 
till we've both had a rest.' Yet those and a 
lot more like them are all things that come 
readily enough into any house-mother's mind 
if she stops to think of the moral health of her 
household at all. But there's one element I 
don't think we modern American women ever 
call to our aid in steadying and fortifying our 
Uves. I don't believe we even know that we 
need it when we encounter, as we often do, 
those dull, savorless stretches of hfe, when 
there's nothing special the matter, no shver 
sticking in your vanity, and still you have a 
gone feeling." 



74 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

"Gracious, do you have those too?" asked 
Mildred, "I didn't suppose anybody else 
knew such stale, flat hours as come to me, 
nothing in the world the matter, especially, 
and yet such an oozing, soggy, bilge-water 
air to everything!" 

"I don't think anybody escapes those," said 
Dorothy, "any modern woman at least. I 
fancy it's especially hard on such fastidious, 
over-refined women as you, who shudder to 
your fingertips when your pet Joss of Good 
Taste gets jolted by life. Do you know what 
I think is the matter with us.^ I believe it's 
the same thing that causes rebelhous out- 
breaks in men — they are apt to be so 
much more positive than we! — the same 
thing that makes them ferment angrily till 
they burst the bottle they're shut into and go 
off on a brutal spree, makes us just inertly 
sour and curdle and gather mould on top." 

"What do you think the trouble is.^" in- 
quired Anna. She groaned and murmured 
"metaphors again!" as Dorothy went on, 
"Now take httle chicks — you know it's the 
queerest thing about them! You keep them 
on a concrete or a board floor all the time, and 
they won't thrive; lots of them won't even 
live. You may feed them exactly the right 
food and give them plenty of water and keep 
them in the right temperature, but they won't 



PRIMITIVE EARTHY ELEMENTS 75 

do well unless they can walk about on the 
ground and scratch in it. Honestly, the best 
chicken experts don't know at all what it is 
they get out of the earth, but they have to 
have it to be healthy." 

"I detest reasoning from animeJs to us," 
said Anna. *' Little chicks thrive on raw wheat 
and bran mush, but if you fed me on that . . . ! " 

Dorothy laughed, but stuck to her point. 
"Well, — you and the chicks both need food, 
and apparently the necessity for earth and 
earthiness is something as essential as food 
for everybody aHve, from baby chicks to 
college professors, — especially the college pro- 
fessors. If you don't get a certain amount of 
it in your life, you won't thrive." 

"Now we're in for gardens!" murmured 
Mildred, who abominated earth stains under 
her fingernails. 

"Or for mountain hikes!" added Emily, 
whose increasing weight made physical exer- 
tion an effort. 

Dorothy waved aside these suggestions. 
"Don't be so hteral. By earthiness I don't 
necessarily mean actual contact with the soil. 
We're not baby chicks, as Anna says. That's 
not the only way, though it's the simplest and 
surest way, if you happen to be fortunate 
enough to like it. No, I mean that everybody 
needs to spend part of every day doing things 



76 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

that aren't done with the civilized part of us. 
After all, that civihzed part isn't all of us, nor 
the most firmly estabhshed part. If we keep 
it too steadily on the job, we're likely to make 
it sickly, and if we don't give the rest of us 
some work to do — that big, hulking, instinc- 
tive, subconscious part, the other's likely to 
get the fidgets and the cramps and indulge in 
spasmodic involxmtary violence that'll upset 
and smash all the pretty things we make with 
the highly seK-conscious part of our brains. 
The instinctive part simply must do something, 
and it's for us to give it not only harmless 
things to do, but useful ones, if we can." 

"Seems as though I'd heard something like 
that before, haven't I.^" inquired Mildred, 
with her ironic, weary impatience of platitudes. 

" Oh, I don't claim it's anything new. Noth- 
ing is new," protested Dorothy. "There isn't 
even anything new in our lack of good sense 
in refusing to apply to our own fives what 
we've always known to be true. You emit a 
superior groan at the mention of our need for 
primitive activities in our lives, but I'll war- 
rant that in all the series of your recurrent 
soggy and bilge-water hours of ennui, it never 
occurred to you to try more plainness and tonic 
roughness in your life. Suppose now in one 
of your moments of conviction that fife is by 
no means worth the trouble it causes, you had 



PRIMITIVE EARTHY ELEMENTS 77 

been suddenly attacked by a charging bull, 
and had had to run across a field and fall 
headlong over a stone wall into safety, don't 
you suppose ..." 

At this they all laughed out suddenly, the 
school-girl loudness of their laughter proving 
Dorothy's point. 

"But we can't all lay up bad-tempered bulls 
in the backyard against dull hours," cried 
Mildred, still laughing. 

"Well, you wouldn't need to apply such a 
fierce counter-irritant if you didn't let the 
congestion get so bad. If you can keep the 
circulation up naturally you won't need mus- 
tard poultices." 

"Dorothy," said Anna resolutely, "will you 
do something for me, as an old friend?" 

"Anything within my power," said Dorothy. 

"I'm not sure it is within your power, but 
I'd like to have you try to say plainly what 
you mean by earthiness and primitiveness in 
our fives ... no charging bulls or fluttering 
hens or mustard poultices, now, just fiteral, 
specific words. What do you mean in my case, 
in Emily's case, for instance?" 

She had the triumphant air of one who has 
pushed an adversary into a corner. 

Dorothy put her back against the wall of 
fiteralness, drew a long breath and began, "I 
mean in every case that we need some activity 



78 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

which harks back to the days when physical 
necessities made up a large share of our lives. 
They're taken care of, mostly, nowadays, by 
civilized cooperation. It's that very coopera- 
tion that is going to give us a black eye unless 
we look out. We used to have to take care of 
ourselves against all sorts of obstacles. Now 
we have only to do one little same thing, over 
and over, as our share of everybody's taking 
care of everybody. To be personal, let's 
take you. Instead of hustHng around, shelter- 
ing yourself against the weather, and getting 
yourself food, and dodging stone clubs that 
happened to fly your way, and shinning up 
trees to escape from wandering saber-tooth 
tigers, what did you do for twenty years of 
your strength and vigor? For seven hours 
every day you sat motionless at a desk, using 
the fingers of your right hand occasionally to 
make a note, and the self-conscious top of 
your brain every minute. All the rest of you, 
all those faculties and powers acquired during 
ages and ages might as well have been dead 
for all the use you made of them. In fact 
they'd much better be dead than neglected. 
Maybe in the course of more ages and ages 
they will die, but for the present they're with 
us, and can't be cut out Hke the appendix. 
You see you never gave them any chance at 
all, not a bit of exercise. You lived in a hotel 



PRIMITIVE EARTHY ELEMENTS 79 

and when you wanted anything you exercised 
the tip of your right forefinger in pressing a 
button. And by and by you began to 'get 
nervous,' and those cherished higher brain- 
centers of yours went on a strike from over- 
work and no vacations, and you were on the 
edge of a 'breakdown.' I should say you 
needed a bigger dose of primitiveness thgoi most 
of us. If I were your doctor, I'd make you 
move right out of that boarding-house where 
you are supposed to be resting, and where 
you are getting worse every moment, and put 
you into a plain Httle two-room cottage and 
make you get your own meals and sweep your 
own floors and struggle with your own plumber 
and make your curtains hang straight after 
they were washed. ..." 

"That's about enough for me, don't you 
think?" Anna suggested dryly, a httle nettled. 
"How about Emily? She's been making 
her ciutaias hang straight and locking horns 
with her plumber, long enough, but she has 
nerves too." 

"Well! Everything's relative. What would 
bring healthful primitiveness into your highly 
artificial life wouldn't be enough for Emily 
and me. I should diagnose Emily, along with 
most of us house-mothers, as house-boimd. 
And if I had the time I'd make a couple of 
illuminated mottos to hang up over our respec- 



80 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

tive desks, with those dehcious prim eighteenth 
century hues of Hannah More's on them, 

* Small hahits well pursued betimes 
May reach the dignity of crimes.' 

And I'd have Emily knock out a big hole in 
the wall of her pretty, tasteful, pleasant, cozy 
home, and walk out through it into the first 
raging thunderstorm that came along. I'll 
just warrant that a thunderstorm has come to 
mean for her nothing more than a scurry to 
shut down the attic windows and be sure that 
Harry's bicycle and the new porch chairs are 
indoors. I don't beUeve she has really looked 
at the might, majesty, and glory of a thunder- 
storm since she was nine years old . . . and 
very hkely then her mother scolded her for 
staying out in it! Or if not thunderstorms, 
I'd recommend camp hfe for a while . . . 
nothing to dust, no cellar to keep in order. Oh 
I know, Mildred, camp life is a pretty well- 
worn platitude of modern hfe, but when you 
come down to it there's nothing very new or 
original in eating beefsteak or taking a bath 
once a day, but both those things are good for 
your health. And I beheve camp hfe would 
do Emily a world of good, for a big dose to 
begin with, to get straightened out. And after 
that a daily dose of earthiness would keep 
OJff that gentle gloom a house-bound woman 



PRIMITIVE EARTHY ELEMENTS 81 

is sure to cast over her family. It's lots better 
to have a daily dose of it, as a constant ingre- 
dient in your Hfe like exercise or food, than to 
live without it for fifty weeks of the year and 
try in two weeks' concentrated dirt and bar- 
barism in a caimp to get enough to last you for 
the next fifty. Though goodness knows the 
two weeks are much better than nothing. Why 
couldn't Emily do her garden-work herself, or 
take care of a horse or a cow or chickens or 
bees, or make a trail with her own hands 
through the woods back of her house to a 
lookout spot, or concrete a path, or rake the 
driveway, or even, if those all seem uninterest- 
ing, spend fifteen minutes every day in observ- 
ing minutely what kind of a day it is, how it 
differs from every other day that ever was or 
will be, how the clouds look and drift, and 
what they portend, exactly what happens to 
the rain when it falls, exactly how the wind 
heaps the snow. You see, for ages, the weather 
vfas the very most important thing to us, and 
it's hardly healthy to be so oblivious to it as 
our tight roofs and automobiles make us. Just 
to look up into the sky, steadily, till you feel 
something of the immensity of it inside you, 
relaxes those tiny, fretting nerve-knots, and is 
something splendid and big all day to bring 
up before you in vexatious moments when 
you forget there is anything bigger in the world 



82 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

than the ceiling to your hving-room, — when 
you forget there is anything splendid in the 
world at all! And yet lots of us go for days 
and days with no more look at the sky than a 
grudging glance to see if we need to take an 
umbrella. Here we crawl around under it, 
gazing down at mudpuddles, and there it 
broods over us, the visible throne of Heaven by 
day, and by night . . . Oh, Emily, do go out 
and look at it by night!" 

"Wouldn't you better save all that for your 
next book ? " suggested Mildred, with her mild, 
slow irony. 

The Beauty Bank 

Dorothy laughed, though not whole-heart- 
edly. "I know how you feel, I do myself, 
terribly afraid of being stilted and highfalutin. 
But after all, doesn't it seem rather a pity to 
save up all the shining, radiant words and 
thoughts one has for the insides of books, and 
to be afraid to use them in every-day life ? It 
seems to me we're as spiritually provincial 
and mediocre if we do that as if we kept a 
*best room' with all the good furniture in it, 
shut up and darkened, the way our silly old 
New England grandmothers did, and spent 
their lives in the kitchen. What harm does 
it do to speak right out about the beauty of 
stars and the strength of storms?" 



THE BEAUTY BANK 83 

"It makes me squirm," said Mildred. "It 
makes me think you're going to talk religion 
next." 

"And of course there's nothing so indecent 
as religion to mention in a conversation be- 
tween friends," agreed Dorothy. She went on, 
"Do you know I believe Mildred's remark 
has put us on the right track. Don't you sup- 
pose it's because we are afraid somebody's 
going to talk religion next; and we're afraid 
of that as a reaction from Puritanical forebears 
who were forced into helpless hypocrisy by 
pubKc opinion and made to talk religion 
whether they felt Hke it or not?" 

"Or maybe," said Mildred, "it's just in the 
Anglo-Saxon blood to distrust rhetoric." 

"Well, in the first place it's not necessarily 
rhetoric to mention the well-known fact that 
the contemplation of a starry night drags you 
up to a liigher kind of thought. And in the 
second, wasn't that gloriously rhetorical King 
James Bible done by Anglo-Saxon translators? 
Not to mention all the Ehzabethans. Well, 
anyhow, I'm going to take my courage in my 
two hands and just boldly, barely, indeco- 
rously mention beauty as a factor in daily hfe. 
If it shocks any of you too much you can go 
'round the corner of the porch till I get through. 
I want to tell you about a device I make use 
of. I couldn't seem to work it into my whimsi- 



84 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

cal story, and so you've got to take it in talk. 
It began years ago when I was a little, little 
girl and had just learned Wordsworth's 'Daf- 
fodils' by heart as my turn for a school com- 
mencement. 

" 'I gazed and gazed, but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought; 
For oft when on my couch I he 
In vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash across that inward eye 
That is the bUss of solitude, 
And then my heart with rapture thrills 
And dances with the daffodils.' 

"One time, as I repeated that over and over 
to be sure I had it right, I said to myself, 'I 
wonder if after that he did have the sense to 
know, whenever he saw something lovely, 
that the show was bringing him wealth?' 
Great-Aunt Ann had just started me off with 
a Httle savings-bank account then, and it 
occurred to me that it would be a good idea 
to bank all the fine and beautiful and joyful 
things that happened to me and have them 
there to draw on when the quite different hor- 
rid and irritating and discouraging things 
happened. I took the notion then at twelve 
with childish Hteralness and it's stayed by me 
just in that first form, as childish notions will. 
And it's not only splendid pictiues and books 



THE BEAUTY BANK 85 

and music I save up and deposit in my memory. 
When I see a glorious sunset, or a radiantly 
happy child, or a peaceful, serene old age, or a 
beautiful room, I quite consciously appro- 
priate it, make it mine for keeps, impress its 
every detail on my mind, so that I can't forget 
it. Then on a gloomy, sour afternoon, or when 
one of the children is cross, or I encounter a 
fretful, suspicious old person, or an ugly, 
tasteless room, I draw on my bank account of 
beauty or strength or success to offset the 
drain on one's vitaHty that's always made by 
ughness and failure. My bank accepts all 
sorts of deposits, it's not a bit high-brow, 
thank goodness. One of the best accounts I 
have is the baUroom at Cullom Hall at West 
Point where I danced away so many hght- 
hearted hours of my girlhood. And another — 
this is particularly fine when I have to talk 
to some foolish, spiteful, shallow woman — 
is the recollection of that great, clear, lucid 
reading-room of the British Museum all 
walled around with immortal thoughts, where 
I spent three or four of the happiest months 
of my early twenties. And one of the very 
best things I have laid up is the recollection 
of a succulent, savory meal eaten with my hus- 
band in a httle hotel in the south of France, 
and of the excellent vigorous white wine and 
the far more excellent and vigorous conversa- 



86 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

tion which played Hke hilarious heat-Hghtning 
around the tahle. I never saw those jovial, 
bearded, Galhc commercial travelers but that 
one hour, and yet I brought them all back to 
Vermont with me, and the serious-minded, 
pine-covered slopes of Red Mountain occa- 
sionally ring to their laughter, to this day." 

"Oh! I do that too," said Mildred. "There 
are certain hours in my schoolroom, when 
the children are very happy and busy, all their 
young eyes bright with that ineffable clear 
look of confidence they sometimes have for 
* Teacher' ... I often say to myself 'Feel 
this! Feel it to the marrow of your bones. 
This is happiness. However it may come to 
other people, this brings joy into my life!' 
But I don't know that I ever tried consciously 
to bring back a sun-flooded hour like that in a 
moment of depression. I might try." 

Anna said, "Since you're on this topic, it 
comes back to me how I used to feel in the 
office some days, when things were going well; 
when I could feel the machine hum imder my 
hand, with every stenographer doing just what 
she was best fitted for, and the fifing system 
working fike a charm. . . . !" 

"You try," suggested Sarah, "making a con- 
scious effort to bring that recollection back to 
your mind the next time your dressmaker 
doesn't keep her appointment. It may keep 



THE BEAUTY BANK 87 

the world from seeming composed uniquely 
of untrustworthy and incompetent dressmak- 
ers, as it's so apt to, at such times." 

"I've had a way a Httle like that, for years," 
Emily put forth rather timidly. She was 
quite aware that some of her hard-headed 
friends found her sentimental and, more sen- 
sitive and responsive than Dorothy, could not 
bring herself to the latter's attitude of not 
caring if they did. "I used to find that read- 
ing the newspapers made me horribly depressed. 
I might start the day brightly enough, but 
my morning half-hour with the Times always 
left me imdone. You know, — divorces, sui- 
cides, embezzlements, mmrders! But then, 
first, I heard somebody suggest that those 
things were only put into the paper because 
they run so contrary to the usual course of 
human life, and second, I began to resolve 
that I'd read as few as possible of those items, 
and that I wouldn't lay the paper down with- 
out finding something heartening and inspiring 
to remember. I call it my daily Golden Deed," 
she murmured, with a deprecatory glance at 
Anna, who however spared her an audible 
sniff and only remarked caustically, 

"Well, you must have to take a microscope 
some mornings to find anything like that in 
your paper." 

"No, you don't," said Emily, bristhng in 



88 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

defense of her idea like a mother hen before 
her brood. "There's always something if you 
look. Often its some old familiar thing we're 
so used to we don't think anything about it. 
There's that threadbare old incident of a 
fireman rescuing a woman or a baby. There's 
hardly ever more than a brief reference in the 
paper to that, but it recurs over and over. 
And if you really think what that means, 
a man risking his own life to save strangers, 
just because they're human beings and mustn't 
be allowed to suffer or die if the rest of humanity 
can help it . . . !" 

"He gets paid for it," opposed Anna, her 
own bristles rising a httle. 

"Well, and then again who pays him.^ We 
do! Part of our taxes go to keep him alive 
and well, so he can save others. It makes me 
think more of the rest of us. We have a httle 
share in what he does, when he creeps along 
the coping and grabs the baby. And besides 
that, nobody makes him go into that business. 
It's his own magnanimity, I beheve! He could 
be tranquilly overcharging a customer as he 
sets up bathroom fixtures, if he wanted to, or 
driving a truck and drinking all the beer 
he Hked." 

"Why, Emily," cried Dorothy, "you're right 
in the middle of all this, aren't you.^^ You've 
been having a Secret of yom* own, without 



THE BEAUTY BANK 89 

jumping up and down and shouting the way 
Sarah and I do, when we get an idea." 

Emily flushed with pleasure and went on, 
"I do something else too, that's hke what 
you're talking about. You know even as a 
child I was a 'fraid-cat,' scared to follow the 
rest of you into the highest limbs of the apple 
trees. Well, since the children were born and 
I haven't been so strong, I began to be afraid 
I was going to lose my nerve altogether, and 
get like Cousin Margaret, — you know the 
jumpy, scary nuisance she is, always afraid 
of something and spoihng everybody's fun! I 
wondered how I could get around that, and I 
took to collecting all the instances of strength 
I could get hold of to brace myself on. It 
began by my happening one day to walk 
abreast of a great team of dappled gray Per- 
cheron dray horses, huge, powerful creatures 
with the muscles on their chests Hke iron. They 
were pulhng a heavy load of iron rails and the 
way they put their tremendous strength into 
their work and stepped along so slowly and 
confidently, sure of their strength, quietly 
enjoying their own vigor ... it stuck in 
my mind, and I began trying to go around my 
own work that way, instead of stooping and 
hurrying and straining. Then again, I took 
the boys to the Zoo. We were in the Hon 
house just before feeding time, and the Hons 



90 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

and tigers were roaring. You know, that great, 
full-throated roar that shakes the earth under 
your feet and makes your diaphragm go up 
and down. It fascinated me, I couldn't think 
why. I stood the longest time in front of the 
biggest Hon, and every time he let out that 
heart-shaking roar I felt (I didn't know why) 
as though some lack in me had been satisfied. 
After I got home it occurred to me that what 
had fascinated me was the enormous power 
represented by that roar, and now often where 
there's a hard job to do, the cellar to be cleaned 
or somebody disagreeable to be interviewed, 
and I feel all withered and used-up at the idea, 
I remember the Hon and give a great roar 
inside, and go right at my job." 

Everybody laughed at this, but it was 
laughter with no sting of scorn in it. Emily 
herself laughed. 

"Our mild Emily roaring inside as she ex- 
horts Mr. Harkness to put new blackboards 
in the schoolhouse!" chuckled Anna. 

"I often have to roar inside when I'm talking 
to you, Anna," said Emily unexpectedly, with 
the sly humor which was the salt of her gentle 
nature. 

The laugh turned against Anna. 

Dorothy said, "I haven't had any roaring 
lions or mighty drayhorses in my bank-of- 
strength, but I'm depositing them there this 



THE BEAUTY BANK 91 

minute, along with tliat great new dam at the 
foot of Kensico Lake, north of New York. 
It's the largest dam in the world, so somebody 
told me, and whether it's that or not, it's a joy 
and stronghold to me. I never lose a chance 
to go and look at it. That huge wall, curved 
in that smooth hne of infinite strength and 
suavity, the enormous body of water it holds 
back with such silent steadiness . . . many's 
and many's the time, when my job has been 
to keep something back, a rising flood of ex- 
asperation, the slow advance of dishearten- 
ment, or tears, perhaps, — I've put the 
strength of the Kensico dam at my back and 
braced myself against it." 

"Sometimes I think it all comes back to that 
notion of power," said Sarah. "I've used it so 
much and with such really surprising results, 
and yet I haven't used it half as much as I 
might have, if I weren't so lazy. (And lazy 
people, as our grandmothers always said, work 
the hardest in the end.) The changes and 
shocks and strains of fife call on all of us for 
endless discrimination and adjustment on the 
one hand and for endless steadying and en- 
couragement on the other, and demand more 
power in us than we've got, unless we use 
every possible means to increase it. Of course 
it isn't just sheer strength we need, though we 
need a lot of that; but endurance, and above 



92 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

all confidence in ourselves, confidence that 
we shall see straight and keep on trying to do 
right, 

"*Our eyes forever on some sign, 
To help us plough a perfect line.' " 

"And to help us be equal to enjoying the 
whole of the day's pleasure too," cried 
Dorothy. "Don't leave out my bank of 
beauty, and my theory about homely pleas- 
ures, jolhty and jokes!" 

" I think the most essential thing to me isn't 
exactly strength," said Mildred thoughtfully. 
"And it certainly isn't homely pleasure. You 
said something a while ago about * seeing 
straight,' Sarah. That would be my idea, my 
Secret, if I could only see things in a plan, see 
them coherent and in proportion, above all 
in proportion! I think I shall spend all my 
quiet half-hours of thought in an effort to 
make big things, and big things only, seem big 
to me." 

"I would like the sense of freedom," said 
Emily. "I beheve a good many housekeepers 
would like that more than anything else." 

"I want endurance," said Anna, with elo- 
quent brevity. 

"Any way, we all need something," said 
Dorothy, "and now that most of us won't 
let priests or theologians tell us what it is, we 



THE BEAUTY BANK 93 

mustn't shirk the task of thinking it out for 
ourselves. After all, isn't it the most exciting 
and absorbing and thrilHng occupation in the 
world, to be holding the tiller of your own bark I 
Here's to you, fellow-captains! Here's hoping 
for us all, 

" ' A wet sheet and a flowing sea, 
A wind that follows fast!' 

And here's a motto to hang up over our charts, 

"'Blow, wind; swell, billow; and swim, bark!'" 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 



THE DEEP SPRING IN THE EVERGREEN FOREST 

A General Reflection for Believers in God 

Who will turn and enter the green forest ? 

Who will seek and taste the fabled spring ? 
Cares £ind competitions of the market 

Leave a little while; nor hither bring 
Hot Ambition; 

These from off thy burdened shoulders fling. 

Enter then at once the open gateway, 
Where the columned branches sway and soar. 

Though thou live amid the dust and tumult 
Of the speeding city's pauseless roar, 

Turn: the forest 
Spreads its green enchantment round thy door. 

Rest, senses, and revive, spirit, 

In the cool and everlasting shade 
Of a thought that turns to things immortal, 

Where a little pause of heart is made, 
And a far hope 

Rises in the distance, not dismayed. 

Part the branches, seek Emiong the mosses. 
Till that spring thou find, most deep, most clear, 

Of the practise of the mighty Presence, 
Consciousness of Godhead present here. 

Living water. 
Quench the dusty thirst of many a year I 



98 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Spring of health, deep spring of saner hving, 
Ever in the heart thou slakest rise 

Fortitudes, serenities, devotions — 
All those brave and great Realities 

That so blithely 
Mock the wisdom of the worldly-wise. 

Should the morrow trouble and perplex thee, 
Come again at even, comrade mine, 

To the deep spring in the silent forest, 
Whereunto the best of earthly wine, 

Palely sparkling, 
Tiu-ns into a cup of lifeless brine. 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 99 

For Sleep 

The room is quiet, 

The hghts are dim, 

The sounds are drowsy 

And far away ; 

My pillow is cool. 

My heart is at peace. 

I rest ... I am resting ... I rest. 



For Sleep when Overtired or Worried 

Cares and anxieties, 

I roll you all up in a bundle together; 

I carry you across the meadow to the river. 

River, I am throwing in a bundle of cares and 

anxieties. 
Float it away to the sea! 

Now I come slowly back across the meadow, 

Slowly into the house. 

Slowly up to my room. 

The night is quiet and cool; 

The hghts are few and dim; 

The sounds are drowsy and far away and melting 

into each other; 
Melting into the night. 
Sleep comes creeping nearer, creeping nearer; 
It goes over my head like a wave. 
I sleep ... I rest ... I sleep. 



100 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For Relief from Moderate Pain 

I take my pain up to the dark, dusty garret 

And leave it there, 

In a dark corner, 

With cobwebs and forgetfulness all over it. 

I take my mind off for a holiday: 

I take it aboard an oceein liner 

Sailing for Naples. 

Blue seas, rise and fall! 

Slowly roll. 

In the distance are looming the Azotcs. . . . 

[£J/c., etc.y following any journey remembered 
pleasantly, or imagined.^ 



For Relief from Severe Pain 

I take the heavy weight of my thoughts in both 

hands; 
With all my strength 
I Uft my thoughts up off my pain. 
Heavy — but I can lift them. . . . 
Steadily, powerfully, I will carry my thoughts 
Away, 

Step by step — further and further away, 
Up the hill. 

Over the brow of the hill, 
And down into the thick of my day's work. 

[This must be followed closely and absorb- 
ingly with plans for work, as interesting, 
complicated, and important as possible. 2 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 101 

To Hasten Recovery 

There is spring in the air! 
The winter of my illness is past. 
Now in the dead trees of my weakness 
The sap is running stronger than ever! 
The trees will be all in leaf next month — 
The May-flowers wiU be out next Sunday — 
It is going to be an early spring, 
The spring of my recovery. 



Another to Hasten Recovery 

The storm is over, 

The blue skies are clearing. 

I WILL, 

I COMMAND, that like a fresh wind, 

Rising and freshening. 

My cheerful courage shall blow the clouds away; 

Briskly blow them away 

From the bright blue morning. 



Before a Minor Operation 

Rise, placid strength, within me! 

Strong, steady pulse, 

Cool, quiet nerves ; 

Tranquilly pass through the operation: 

Wholesomely heal; 

Serenely recover. 



102 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Before a Serious Operation 

\_IS desired J use while taking the anaesthetic. 2 

Deep, still reservoirs of power and strength within 
me, 

I send down this bucket of my need. 

Fill it with the water of Ufe! 

Fill it with power and strength and calmness, 

Deep and all-pervading. 

I drink in strength; 

I quench my thirst for power and calmness. 

Yet there will be plenty left 

For aU. the emergencies in my life; 

For the deep reservoirs 

Are fed by the never-failing springs on the ever- 
lasting mountains. 

To Relieve Asthma. 

[_Asthma is peculiarly amenable to sugges- 
tion, but it may be found more desirable 
for a friend or relation to suggest to the 
patient. The patient meanwhile should in- 
dustriously remember that in asthma there 
is no infection, no inflammation, no lesion 
whatever; that the wearisome panting is 
spasmodic and convulsive and consequently 
VERY CONTROLLABLE by the imagination 
and will.]] 

Now quietly ... 
At last more quietly . , . 
At last more easily . . . 
And still more easily; 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 103 

You relax . . . you rest . . . you are resting. 

Breathing more calmly . . . 

Breathing more slowly . . . 

Relaxing, growing quieter; 

At last you are able to rest. 

You are resting . . . you rest. . . . 

lEtc, with slight variations, for an hour if 
necessary, including one or two short rests 
for the suggester. It should be repeated in 
an exceedingly soft, soothing voice.2 



To Make Well-grounded Fears Endurable 

In the shifting cross-currents of hoping and fearing 
Here I stand! busy with my work . . 
Securely balanced among the shifting currents 
Standing steady . . . secure . . . going on stead- 
ily with my work. 



Against a Chronic Ailment 

I hght my will, like a torch, 

I lift it blazing on a tall pole, 

To drive out the wolves of discouragement that 

feed on my health. 
Back, wolves! Blaze up, my will! 
The torch blazes up; 
The wolves slink away, out of the light, . . . into 

the darkness, . . . lost and forgotten. . . . 



104 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For Use in an Incurable Ailment 

At bedtime I put my head out of the window to 
symbolize going out of my small, steam-heated, 
gas-lighted bedroom of mortality into the light 
of stars and the boundless fresh air of the im- 
mortal life. 

Here, out-doors in immortality, 

I breathe in power and calmness; 

I stock my soul with freedom and power. 

For tomorrow. 

And all the days beyond tomorrow that I can 
make this reach to. 



Lift up 

The golden cup! 

God's grapes are always red. — T. E. Brown, 

To Receive a Verdict 

My strong and fearless Will, 

Remember, 

If the verdict is against us. 

And yet we win out, in the teeth of it, 

I and my Will 

Shall be the hope and the inspiration of many, 

Great explorers, great pioneers ! 

After Discouraging News of One's Physical 
Condition 
Impregnable and immortal part of me. 
Remind me. 

That of these leaks in the cottage we have rented 
for the summer 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 105 

Many are repairable, with time and patience, 
Even when they seem impossible to repair; 
And when the cottage becomes at last uninhabit- 
able. 
The soul will merely move into another house. 



Against the Fear of Death 

Wind, blow full the wide sails for death, the ad- 
venturous voyage! 

I will pack up all my bravery, and cleanness, and 
kindness, and usefulness, 

Along with all my friendships and loves. 

And be ready to sail at a moment's notice, 

Whenever the ship sails. 

Courage! home is not all: there are houses and 
gardens elsewhere. 

Another Against the Fear of Death 

Friendly, natural, normal, wholesome death, 
You shall never be a bugbear to me! 
I steadfastly, obstinately, lomiovably, 
Will not be afraid to go to sleep 
And wake up in a strange place. 
I will go to sleep cheerfully. 
Remembering how I foimd a welcome here, 
Sure of a welcome there; 
Sure to be at home. 



Let those fear who will; the soul is in her native 
realm. — Emerson, 



106 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For Believers in Immortality 

Foundress and lover of my life, 
My Mother, Immortality, 

Lean down to this backward and unstable daugh- 
ter: 
Take hold of my hand! 



For Hopers in Immortality 

Yes, I accept the challenge ! 

I will ride my horse up to the barrier, 

And take the leap. 

If he misses it this time, 

I wiU ride at the barrier again, — 

Abreast of ten thousand others, — 

And if need be again and again, 

Until, at last. 

We will leap high enough, 

We will leap over it. 



To Realize the Quality of Immortality 

We caU this Time, and gauge it by the clock, 
Deep in such insect cares as suit that view: 
As, whether dresses fit, what modes are new. 

And where to buy, and when to barter, stock. 

We think we hold, based on some Scripture rock, 
Claims on immortad life, to press when due: 
Imagining some door between the two. 

Our deaths shall each, with presto change, unlock. 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 107 

But this is also everlasting life! 

On Monday, in the kitchen, street and store, 
We are inunortal, we, the man and wife, — 

Immortal now, or shall be nevermore. 
Immortals in immortal values spend 
Those lives that can no more begin than end. 



For a Sense of Comparative Values 

I firmly will, 

That all tomorrow I may be steadily aware of the 

real values of hfe; 
Steadily preferring 
The interests of eternity 
To the affairs of today ; 

And steadily preferring the true interest of today 
To the whims of the moment. 



''An Air of Coolness Plays Upon His Face'' 

Out of the four and twenty hours, 

To take one sheaf of moments 

To open the house and air it 

In the May morning of Eternity, 

Will not, my dear Self, 

Leave aU your cares and duties 

Naked to the little foxes, 

But guard them with a golden bayonet! 

Efficient would we be with the farming, 

The baking, the children. 

Swing wide the dormer windows of Now 

To the sunht breezes of Forever! 



108 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

To Keep Alive the Spirit of Adventure 

Man! 

Which is thy darling ? 
Fat ease, dull comfort, 
Base prosperity, 
Or craven safety P 
Or fair-faced danger, 
Bright-eyed danger, 
Golden-haired danger ? 

State! 

Would'st thou allure youth 

Into thy service ? 

Ply him not then 

With rich emoluments. 

Pomps of office. 

Inaugural pageants! 

But dare him rather 

To risk his fortune, 

To burn behind him 

The bridges of Mammon, 

And loss and peril and toil embracing, 

To build thy glorious future. 

Church! 

Would'st thou enroll him 
Beneath thy banners. 
And sign on his forehead 
The blood-red cross ? 
Oh, call him not then 
With plaintive music. 
And soothing sermons; 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 109 

Oh never for him 

Expunge and soften 

The words of Jesus! 

But bind upon him 

The shield and buckler 

And march him forth 

With the trumpets sounding 

The charge of the long Crusade! 

Yes, 

This is man's darling, — 
Not ease, not comfort, 
Tame prosperity 
And coward safety! 
But fair-faced danger. 
Strong young danger, 
Free-hearted danger! 



110 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

To Relieve Hearts too Sore with Sympathy 

If then some natural shadows passed 

The inward prospect over, 
The soul's deep vaUey was not slow 

Her brightness to recover. — Wordsworth, 

For the sake of the sorrowful man and child and 

beast whose wrongs I make mine ; 
To keep strong, to keep sane. 
For the sake of their battles I have to fight; 
I think long tonight of the freedom of birds 
And the wild life of the woods. 
And lovers wedking by starlight. 
And the glory and splendor of athletes, 
And old men and women sitting in doorways in 

the cool of the day and of their age, 
And the shouting frolics of children. 
Loved and happy and safe in a thousand homes. 

These rest the heart, until there come 
Far echoes of the summoning drum, 
And on the windy plain 
The colors rise again. 



For the Enjoyment of Little Things 

All along the wayside today 
I will pick the wild-flowers, 

Sweet-scented Ordinary, bright-flowering Every- 
day; 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 111 

Brightness of common colors and sweetness of 

familiar voices and faces; 
Beauty and bravery of neighbors and of members 

of the family; 
I will make a bouquet of them for our table, 
And set them up in a blue and gold pitcher 
On the mantel over the hearth. 



For Light-heartedness 

Once in the middle of the plodding morning, 

And again in the middle of the dispirited afternoon, 

I will turn my eyes away from the clock, 

And my heart from responsibility, — 

And into my mind I will invite, helter-skelter, 

Pictures of children on roller skates 

Flying down the shining pavements 

In an April sunshower ; 

And the sound of the horseplay of boys in the 

swimming-hole, 
Ducking and dousing each other; 
And the thrill of dance music to the feet of sixteen. 
And the clapping and stamping and whirl of the 

Virginia reel; 
And the swish and tinkle of ice-water and the 

breath of a palm-leaf fan. 
And the jovial voices of friends on the porch in the 

evening, 
And the sound of my own voice, overcome with 

laughter. 



112 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Against Self-indulgence in Clothes 

Dream dresses, 

Modish, graceful, 

Remembered dresses of delicate color, 

Delicate textm-e, inviting my hand to stroke them 

as they lay on the counter, 
Melt away! 

Melt and shrink away, dream dresses I 
Be forgotten. 

I might buy dresses 

For children sitting on tenement fire-escapes, 

Whose dresses are soiled, 

Frayed, faded, Ump and forlorn; 

Whose dresses were never new. 

For them I might buy 

Pink and blue calicoes . . . 

White dresses for holidays, and Roman sashes. . . . 



And Brother Peter asked him, "Why seemeth the 
raiment of St. Francis more fair than thine?" 
"Forasmuch as when he lived on earth, he did 
wear raiment more poor and mean than mine." 

To Safeguard the Heart from Hardness 

I steadfastly willf 
I firmly command my heart. 
That when next I feel the leaden cooHng of friend- 
liness and pity within me, 
Into my memory shall run 
The thought of the child I love best, 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 113 

Undressed and ready for bed, 

Or hiding behind the door, 

And cautiously peeping out; 

Or stubbing his toe and falUng, 

And crying a little and chmbing up on my lap, 

To hear the story of the Three Bears over again. 



Against Absorption in Small Details; or 
The Camp 

Now after the close day indoors 
Oiling and whirring the machine, 
Contriving, arranging, calculating, 
Piecing small details of haste and expediency into 
each other, 

I will sleep tonight in the camp I 
I will make my bed of balsam 
And my pillow of pine, 
And the stars shall be my candles, 
And the four points of the compass my open 
window I 

I will camp in my own free heart, 
And rest on the evergreen thoughts 
Of the meaning and greatness and challenge of life. 
In the deep woods of the Remembrance of 
Eternity. 



114 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Against Fidgets 

Nervous apprehensions. 

Blow away! 

Blow far away! 

Over the edge of the world; 

Be lost there! 

Lost and forgotten. . . . 



For Adequacy under Strain 

Quit you like men: be strong. — St. Paul. 

In front of my house 

Grows a tall, powerful pine tree; 

And now when I hear the wind roaring up from 

the Hollow, 
Blowing along a storm, 
I come out of my house. 
And hold on to that great pine, 
Winding my arm round it. 
Till I feel its firm strength against my heart. 
For the wind may blow down the chimney built 

by the hands of man, 
And tear off the flimsy roof, 
And crack the panes. 
But this pine tree, Steadfastness, 
Only bends and recovers and stands again straight, 
Stronger and straighter than ever. 

And having done all, stand.— Ephesians. 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 115 

For Courage 

Altitudo! 

Into the loud surf, 

Down over the sands of safety, 

I come running and shouting. 

Against me the breakers 

Crouch and spring, hurtle £uid roar. 

I make myself an arrow; 

Dizzily I dive through them, 

Blinded, with singing ears. 

And pounding heart. 

Suddenly I am in the clear water, 

The deep-sea water, 

The buoyeuit and calm water 

Beyond the breasted danger, 

On the far side of courage. 



116 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For an Increase of Fellow-feeling 

Momentous to himself as I to me 

Hath each man been that ever woman bore. 

— William Watson. 

I throw my imagination, like a bull's-eye lantern, 

On the sorrows and blunders and happiness and 
triumph and disgrace that come to my neighbors, 

And even to people whose names are in the paper. 

Who have been elected to office, 

Or have been arrested for crimes. 

Brightly I Ught them up with the bull's-eye lan- 
tern, 

Showing them fathers and mothers and sisters 
and brothers; 

Human, with human relations and human feeUngs 
and foolishness. 

Into the shadow and darkness, 
"What is it to me .^" 

I throw the clear light of 
"Suppose he were I, and I he I" 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 117 

For Fellow-feeling toward Animals 

Whenever I see roast beef on the table, 
Remind me, memory, that it was once alive, and 
that it died in pedn. 

When I see lions in menageries, 
Remind me that they are slaves, and that they 
long to be free. 

When I see beautiful furs, 

Make me thmk of the terror and thirst and fever 

and pain 
Of a small wild creature crushed in the steel 

teeth of a trap. 

Self within myself, then inquire of me. 
What sort of foundation for my pleasure is their 
pain .^ 



... He turned an easy wheel, 
That set sharp racks at work. ... — Keats, 



118 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

J. 0. H,'s Recipe for Calmness 

I see the early twilight settling over a ploughed 

field 
With tiny drifts of spring snow in the furrows; 
The spring air, fragrant and sharp with dampness, 
Darkens round an old farmhouse, 
And a quiet farmyard, settled and still for the 

night. 
All but a faint far-off lowing 
And a drowsy far-off tinkle. . . . 



Another for Calmness^ by J, 0, H. 

Eyes of my memory and soul, 

Dwell on the picture of Whistler's mother, 

On the long lines of the plain dress. 

And the calm attitude, 

In the still light in the quiet room; — 

Infinite tranquillity. 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 119 

For a Feeling of Freshness in the Morning 

Freshening showers, all night 

Are blowing up from the southwest 

To revive my thirsty garden. . . . 

When I wake up, 

After the long refreshment of the darkness, 

I shall be rosy and cheerful and brisk and clean; 

I shall feel like working and like whistling. 

For a Quick Eye for Beauty 

Now, my beauty-craving eyes, 

I bathe you in the cool spring, 

In the wide violet meadow. 

Feel the coolness! 

Feel the freshness! 

Forever after this 

I shall rejoice in the beauty of the wisdom of a 

wrinkled old face, 
And the beauty of leafless weather. 
And the beauty of rain and mist. 
The beauty of a bit of blue paper blowing in the 

grass, 
And prisms and rainbows in a glass of water 

at the breakfast table. 
I shall see the sweet eyes of soiled and neglected 

children, 
And I shall hear the music of the patient voice of 

middle age replying without rancor. 



"0 Beauty, touch me, make me wise!" 

— John Masefield. 



120 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For the Deliberate Recalling of Great Moments 
in Life 

Jaded and disillusioned as I am, 

Suffocated with drudgery and monotony, 

I will go to the chest in the storeroom 

And take out the great days of my life, 

To put back the lost heart into the small days. 

I remember the day of the Emergency, 

When I rose — (it was I !) to the greatness of the 

occasion, 
Directed, decided, took the great step, 
Saved the day for all of them. 
I remember the day of my Bravery, 
When I risked my life, when I kept faith, when I 

lived gloriously and fearlessly! 
I remember the first day of my Love . . . 
And I remember the day of my great Sorrow, 
When I said I would never be blind again to the 

comfort of calmness and contentment. 
Last I remember the day 
When a man or a woman, by my help, withstood 

a temptation; 
And the day 
When I saw him withstand it alone. 



SARAH'S COLLECTION 121 



THE SOUL AND BODY 

Body and soul are married lovers: 
God was their witness when they wed, 

Beside the tree of life in Eden; 

"These twain shall be one flesh," He said, 

But man has put them oft asunder: 
And not alone by fire and sword, 

But duped by lying metaphysic, 
He oft denies, in deed and word, 

This marriage between earth and heaven; 

While ever to the steadfast skies, 
The prayers of these old constant lovers 

In patient iteration rise: 

"OA Priest, my little love remember! 

My patient love, the Body, see! 
What thou canst do to ease her burdens 
Shall greatly lift and strengthen me/" 

*'0/i wise Physician, now no longer 
Neglect my Lord and Love, the Soul! 

While he lies sick in pain and fever 
No drugs can make the Body whole.'' 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 



Next to the originator of a good sentence is the quoter of it. 

Emerson. 



For Warm-heartedness 
Harden not your heart! — Psalms, 

The only way to have a friend is to be one. They 
eat your services Hke apples, and leave you out. 
But love them and they feel you! — Emerson, 

Ah! why cannot we live as though we always 
loved! It was this the saints and heroes did, — this 
and nothing more. — Maeterlinck. 

Little do men perceive what solitude is and how 
fair it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and 
faces are but a gallery of pictures and talk but 
tinkling cymbals, where there is no love. — Bacon. 

The best Society and conversation is that in which 
the heart has a larger place than the head. 

— LaBruyere, 

The heart has reasons which reason cannot know. 

— Pascal. 

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. 

— Emerson. 

The heart must often correct the follies of the 
head. — Froude. 

"Home is the place where, when you have to go 
there, 
They have to take you in." 

"I should have called it 
Something you somehow haven't to deserve." 

— Robert Frost 



126 PELLOW CAPTAINS 

Against Revenge and Hatred 

The desire for revenge keeps a man's own wounds 
fresh and green which otherwise would heal and do 
well. — Bacon. 

It is the glory of a man to pass by an offense. 

— Psalms, 

He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his 
brother, is in darkness even until now. 

— St. John. 

No man ever had a point of pride that was not 
injurious to him. — Burke. 

Folks never understand the folks they hate. 

— Lowell. 

Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should 
die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should 
return from his ways, and live ? — Ezekiel. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 127 

For the Love of Truth 

Happy the man taught by the Truth itself, 
Not by the shapes and sounds that pass across 
his life. — Thomas a Kempis. 

In all debates let Truth be thy aim, not victory, 
and endeavor to gadn, rather than to expose, thy 
opponent. — William Penn. 

Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, 
Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's bare breast. 

— James Thomson. 

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth 
not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs 
of the world half so daintily and half so stately as 
candle-hght. — Bacon. 

Truth, like a torch, the more it's shook the more 
it shines. — Bacon. 

The most fatal of thoughts is that which cannot be 
friends with reality. — Maeterlinck. 

I have nothing to do with creeds. It is more than 
I can do now to be a good man. — Emerson. 

Truth is the hiest thing a man may keep. 

— Chaucer. 

It takes two to tell the truth; one to tell it and 
one to hear it. — Thoreau. 



128 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Aspiration 

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — 
anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is 
the contemplation of the facts of life from the high- 
est point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding 
and jubilant soul. — Emerson. 

Hath man no second life ? Pitch this one high I — 
Sits there no judge in Heaven our sin to see ? 
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey. — 
Was Christ a man like us ? Ah, let us try 
If we then too can be such men as he I — Arnold, 

Strange that we creatures of the petty ways, 
Poor prisoners behind these fleshly hais, 
Can sometimes think us thoughts with God ablaze 
Touching the fringes of the outer stars. 

And stranger still that having flown so high 
And stood unshamed in shining presences 
We can resume our smallness, nor imply 
In mien or gesture what the memory is. 

— Richard Burton. 

Immortality is not a gift! 

Immortality is an achievement. — Masters. 

What I aspired to be 

And was not, comforts me. — Browning. 

A man's reach should exceed his grasp 
Or what's a Heaven for ? — Browning. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 129 

It is comforting to people with free and vagrant 
minds, to feel that there is a Christianity back of, 
and even without, Christ, to which Christ seems 
. . . interpreter. — Samuel Bowles, 

Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel! — St. Paul 

At man thou smilest, Inaccessible! 
The cUmbing instinct is enough for thee. 

— Lowell 

Well, I say, live it out like a god. 
Sure of immortal Hfe though you are in doubt. 
If that doesn't make God proud of you. . . . 
Sleep is the golden goal. — Masters. 

And he who flagged not in the earthly strife, 
From strength to strength advancing, — only he. 
His soul well knit, and all his battles won. 
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life. — Arnold. 



130 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Social Relations 
Bear ye one another's burdens. — St. John, 

Let's all both of us do it together! 

— Saying of a Four-year-old. 

To every one according to his need: from every 
one according to his abihty. — Louis Blanc. 

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with 
them. — St. Paul. 

To what end do we arm ourselves with this har- 
ness of philosophy ? Let us look down at the poor 
people, that we see scattered about the face of the 
earth, prone and intent upon their business, that 
neither know Aristotle nor Cato, example nor pre- 
cept. From these does Nature every day extract 
effects of constancy and patience, more siue and 
manly than those we so inquisitively study in the 
schools. The very names by which they call dis- 
eases sweeten and mollify the sharpness of them. 
The tisik is with them no more than "a cough," the 
pleurisie but "a stitch" and as they gently name 
them, so they patiently endure them. These sick- 
nesses are very great and grievous indeed when they 
are allowed to hinder ordinary labor; and they keep 
their beds but to die. — Montaigne. 

Society gains nothing whilst a man not himself 
renovated, attempts to renovate things about him. 

— Emerson. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 131 

The beggarly question of parentage, what is it, 
after all? What does it matter whether a child is 
yours by blood or not ? All the Uttle ones of our time 
are collectively the children of the adults of the time, 
and entitled to our general care. That excessive 
regard of parents for their own children and their 
disregard for other people's is, like class-feeling, 
patriotism, save-your-soul-ism and other such vir- 
tues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom. — Hardy, 

He regarded the world as his natural prey, and 
was enraged and furious because it was too large 
for him to swallow. — Holland, 

One can as easily hide personaUty and individuahty 
under ever so great a mass of machinery as one could 
hide the ocean under ever so big a piece of chiffon. 
We may possibly be living in that infinitesimal 
fraction of time when the chiffon first strikes the 
water, but it can be but the time of a heartbeat 
before humanity comes soaking through. — D. C. F. 

What, indeed, is their whole life [i.e., the very 
poor] but a species of physical punishment? 

— Seymour Deming. 

Everybody gets invited out to dine except the 
people who need a dinner. — Walter Rauschenbusch, 

The passion of passions, the hope of hopes, that 
he, even he, may somehow make the world better. 

— Henry George. 

How dare you place anything before a man? 

— Whitman. 



132 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Despairer, here is my neck! 
By God, you shall not go down; hang your whole 
weight upon me. — Whitman, 

When the devil takes the hindmost, the wrench 
is felt by the topmost; felt to the very marrow of 
his bones. — Edmond Kelly. 

With all your main and all your might, 
You back what is against what's right. 

— John Masefield. 

He who gives a child a treat 
Makes joy-bells ring in heaven's street; 
And he who gives a child a home 
Builds palaces in Kingdom Come. 

— John Masefield. 

If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there re- 
memberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; 
leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; 
first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come 
and offer thy gift. — Jesus. 

The traditions of past ages weigh like an Alp on 
the brain of the living. — Karl Marx. 

What is this, the sound and rumor ? What is this 

that all men hear. 
Like the wind in hollow valleys, when the storm is 

drawing near. 
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear ? 
'Tis the people marching on. 

— William Morris. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 133 

For Clear Thinking 

Skeptics empty out the baby along with the bath. 

— Carlyle. 

Suppose you should be startled in the dark night 
by something which looked like a specter. Would 
not he who should bring a lantern and show you 
that it was but a white cloth hanging to a bush, 
give you far greater encouragement than he who 
merely exhorted you to keep up your heart, look 
the other way, whistle and pass on ? — Whately. 

An intelligent conscience is one of the greatest of 
luxuries. — H. W. Beecher. 

The doctrinaire lays all the blame, for the dis- 
crepancy between himself and the universe, on the 
universe. — Crothers, 

The laws of morality are also the laws of art. 

— Schumann. 

There is many a conquering hero to whom Fate 
has malignantly appended a Tin Kettle of Ambition. 

— Carlyle. 

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul. — Fuller, 

No man has learned anything rightly, till he 
has learned that every day is Doomsday. 

— Emerson, 



134 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

No one is infallible at Oxford, not even the 
youngest of us. — Dr, Jowett 

It was said of Gladstone that his conscience, in- 
stead of being his monitor, was his accomplice. 

Parched corn eaten today that I may have roast 
fowl for my dinner on Sunday when people see it, 
is baseness; but parched corn and a house of one 
apartment that I may be free of perturbations, 
that I may be serene, so that the mind may speak 
and be girt and road-ready for the poet's mission of 
knowledge and good-will, is frugality for gods and 
heroes. — Emerson. 

I have no expectation that any man will read his- 
tory aright who thinks that what was done in a 
remote age by men whose names have resounded 
far has any deeper sense than what he is doing 
today. — Emerson. 

Children need models more than critics. — Joubert, 

Why, sir, if Bolingbroke really does think there 
is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he 
leaves our houses, let us count our spoons. 

— Dr. Johnson. 

Neither pity and benevolence nor hope can ever 
dispense with justice. — Turgot. 

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; 
it can never be made impulsive to good. 

— Horace Mann. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 135 

Radicals of forty trying to stamp the life out of 
radicals of twenty. — Meredith. 

The egoist feels that possession, without obliga- 
tion to the object possessed, approaches felicity. 

— Meredith. 

The wages of sin are death, but they are not paid 
every Saturday night. — Benvenuto Cellini. 

What maikes life dreary is lack of motive. 

— George Eliot. 



136 FELLOW CAPTAINS 



Against Dullness and Routine 

Now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for 
now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. 

— Romans. 



Awake, awake, put on thy strength, Zion; 
put on thy beautiful garments. — Isaiah. 

If I have faltered more or less 
In my great Task of Happiness, 
Lord, thy most pointed Pleasure take 
And stab my spirit broad awake. 

— Stevenson. 



Our little lives always stagnate into hypocrisy 
or morbidity unless the general wave of the world 
continually refreshes and recreates them. 

— Chesterton. 



We do not stumble over mountains, but over 
mole-hills. — Chinese Proverb. 



Yet a little while, 

Yet a little way, 
Saints shall reap and rest and smile 

All the day; — 
Up I let's trudge another mile! 

— Christina Rossetti. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 137 

Why do we heap huge mounds of years 
Before us and behind, 
And waste the little days that pass 
Like angels on the wind ? 

Each turning round a small, sweet face 
As beautiful as near, — 
Because it is so small a face, 
We will not see it clear. 

And so it turns from us, and goes 
Away in sad disdain: 
Though we would give our lives for it, 
It never comes again. 

— Dinah Muloch Craik, 



138 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For a Sense of Beauty 

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be 
poetry. And every fair and manly trait shall add 
a richer strain to the song. — Emerson. 

Oh Beauty, touch me, make me wise! 

— John Masefield. 

Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty 
is the result of perfect economy. — Emerson. 

For the good man delights in acts of virtue and is 
vexed by acts of vice just as a musician is pleased 
by good music and pained by bad. — Aristotle. 

Loveliness, magic, grace, 
They are here! they are set in the world. 
They abide; and the finest of souls 
Hath not been thrilled by them all, 
Nor the dullest been dead to them quite. 

— Arnold, 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 139 



For a Sense of Responsibility for One's Own Life 

Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron 
string. — Emerson, 

Religion, science, philosophy, still at variance upon 
many points, all agree on this; that every existence 
is an aim. — Mazzini. 

If thou wouldst conquer thy weakness, never 
gratify it. — William Penn. 

Use what language we will, we can never say any- 
thing but what we are. . . . What you are thun- 
ders in my ears so loud that I can not hear what 
you say. — Emerson. 

I have learned that no man in God's wide earth 
is able to help any other man. Help must come 
from the bosom alone. — Pestalozzi. 

There comes no adventure but wears to our soul 
the shape of our everyday thoughts; and deeds of 
heroism are but offered to those who for many 
years have been heroes in obscurity and silence. 

— Maeterlinck. 

Our chief want in Hfe is somebody to make us do 
what we can! — Emerson. 

Half the self-sacrifice, half the self-denial, the 
moral resolution which Fitzgerald exercises to keep 
himself easy, would amply furnish forth a martyr 
or a missionary. His tranquillity is hke a pirated 
copy of the Peace of God. — Spedding. 



140 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

Blessed is he who has dropped even the smallest 
coin into the iron box which contains the precious 
savings of mankind. — Henry James, 

The man who is contented with what he has done 
has lain down to die. The grass is already growing 
over him. — Bovee. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 141 

For Moral Independence 

Whatever any one does or says, I must be good. 

— Marcus Aurelius. 

Seek the good of other men; but be not in bondage 
to their fancies, for that is but a softness that taketh 
an honest man prisoner. — Bacon. 

In the brain of a fanatic, in the hair-splitting con- 
scientiousness of some eccentric person who has 
found some new scruple to embarrass himself and 
his neighbors witheJ, is to be found that which 
shall constitute the times to come. — Emerson. 

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the 
manhood of every one of its members. . . . Whoso 
would be a man, must be a non-conformist. 

— Emerson. 

If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict 
each other, he would take the two truths and the 
contradiction along with them; [i.e. the sane, 
mystical, ordinary man.] — Chesterton. 

Feeble souls do not wish to be lovely, but to be 
loved. — Emerson. 

How does Nature deify us! Give me health and 
a day, and I can make the pomp of emperors ridicu- 
lous. — Emerson. 

God offers to every mind its choice between truth 
and repose. — Emerson. 

Woe to him who has no court of appeal against 
this world's judgment. — Carlyle. 



142 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For an Enlightened Acceptance of Hard Facts 
in Life 

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, 
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out 
and sees her adversary, but shnks out of the race 
where that immortal garland is to be run for not 
without dust and heat. — Milton. 

"What will you have?" quoth God. "Take it 
and pay for it." — Emerson. 

Nature does not coddle us. We are her children, 
not her pets. — Emerson. 

Never hesitate to apply the most sublime con- 
solation to the smallest trouble. — Phillips Brooks. 

Transition is ever full of pain. The eagle when he 
moults is sickly. — Carlyle. 

All that can be annihilated must be annihilated, 
that the children of Jerusalem may be saved from 
slavery. — Blake. 

Ease is the worst enemy of happiness. — Chesterton. 

Not the absence of vice but vice there and virtue 
holding her by the throat is the ideal human state. 

— William James. 

Rest! Almost nobody needs rest. What they 
need is hard work and tranquil minds. 

— Robert Herrick, 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 143 

The very fiends weave ropes of sand 
Rather than taste pure Hell in idleness. 

— Browning. 

The every-day cares and duties which men call 
drudgery are the weights and counterpoises of the 
clock Time, giving its pendulum a true vibration 
and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease 
to hang upon the wheels the pendulum no longer 
swings, the hemds no longer move, the clock stands 
still. — Longfellow. 

There is one thing that a man knows about his 
own business better than any outsider, and that is 
how hard it is for him to do it. The adviser is al- 
ways telling him how to do it in the finest possible 
way; while he, poor fellow, knows that the para- 
mount issue is whether he can do it at all. — Crothers. 

There are certain self-pleasing minds that go 
near to think their girdles and geirters be bonds and 
shackles. — Bacon. 

Excellence is not common and abundant. She 
dwells among rocks hardly accessible and a man 
must almost wear out his heart before he can reach 
her. — Greek saying. 

Virtue rejecteth facility to be her companion. 
She requireth a rough, craggy, and thorny path. 

— Montaigne. 



144 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

All are not taken! There are left behind 
Living Beloveds, tender looks to bring, 
And make the dayUght still a happy thing. 

— E. B. Browning. 

Drudgery leads to felicity. — Whistler. 

That those things which cannot be shaken may 
remain. — Hebrews. 

St. Paul's "faith" was the full assent of the soul. 

— Spinoza. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 145 

For Courage and Endurance 

. . . The thirty-third year of life, that earher 
climacteric when the men with a vision first feel 
conscious of a past and reflectively mark its shadow. 
It is then that they either press forward eagerly 
with new impulse in the way of their high calling, 
knowing the Hmitations of circumstance and the 
hour; or else fainting draw back their hand from 
the plough and ignobly leave to another or to none 
the accomplishment of the work. — Morley. 

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be 
removed, £uid though the mountains be carried into 
the midst of the sea. — Psalms. 

Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave. — Wordsworth, 

'Tis writ on Paradise's gate, 

"Woe to the dupe who yields to Fate I " — Hafiz. 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 
Seem here no painful inch to gain. 
Far back through creeks and inlets making 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main: 

And not by eastern windows only 

When daylight comes, comes in the fight. 

In front, the sun cfimbs slow, how slowly! 

But westward, look! the land is bright. — Clough. 

Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, 
not with my weakness. — Thoreau. 



146 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

To fear not Fortune's endeavors, 

Nor covet the game at all, 
But fighting, fighting, fighting, 

Die driven against the wall. 

— Louise Imogen Guiney. 

It is too late ? Ah, nothing is too late 
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate I 
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles 
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides 
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers 
When each had numbered more than fourscore 

years. — Longfellow. 

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed. 
Lets in new light from chinks that time has made; 
Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become 
As they draw near to their eternal home. — Waller. 

. . . the much-sought prize of Eternal Youth 
Is just arrested growth. — Masters. 

'Tis man's perdition to be safe. — Emerson. 

The bark of danger is worse than its bite. 

— H.G.Wells. 

'Tis cowardice, not virtue, to lie squat in a fur- 
row under a tomb, to evade the blows of fortune. 

— Montaigne. 

Glory and rest do not sit in one same form. 

— Montaigne. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 147 

But who, if he be called upon to face 

Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 

Great issues, good or bad, for human kind 

Is happy as a lover. — Wordsworth. 

It fortifies my soul to know 

That though I perish, Truth is so . . . 

I steadier step when I recall 

That if I slip, Thou dost not faU. — Clough. 

"Fight on, my men," Sir Andrew said: 
"A little I'm hmrt, but not yet slain. 
I'll just lie down and bleed awhile 
And then I'll rise and fight again." 

■- Old Ballad. 



148 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

For a Trust in Life and Nature 

The highest gift of knowledge ; — 

That all life, grief, wrong, 

Turn at the last 

To beauty and to song. — R. W. Gilder. 

On spring days I tramped through the country, 
To get the feeling, which I sometimes lost, 
That I was not a separate thing from the earth. 

— Masters. 



Wisdom makes but a slow defense against trouble, 
misfortune and grief, but at the last a sure one. 

— Goldsmith. 



After winter foUoweth summer, after night the 
day returneth, and after the tempest a great calm. 

— A Kempis. 

Where lies the land to which the ship would go ? 
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. 
And where the land she travels from ? Away 
Far, far behind, is all that they can say. 

— Clough. 

A ship-wrecked sailor, buried on this coast, 
Bids you set sail! 

Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost. 
Weathered the gale. — Greek Epitaph. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 149 

I have grown to believe that an old man seated 
in his armchair waiting patiently with his lamp 
beside him, giving unconscious ear to all the eternal 
laws that reign eibout his house, submitting with 
bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny; 
— I have grown to believe that he, motionless as 
he is, does yet live in a reality deeper, more human, 
more universal, than the captain who conquers in 
battle. — Maeterlinck, 

Go with mean people, and you think life is 
mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a 
proud place. — Emerson. 

If you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt 

about you. 
You must come out of them. — H. G. Wells 



Free the immortal part of your being, and give 
it charge concerning the rest. — Feuchtersleben. 

The cool disengaged air of natural objects makes 
them enviable to us, chafed, irritable creatures with 
red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they 
if we but camp out and eat roots. But let us be 
men instead of woodchucks. — Emerson, 

The great majority of men seem to be mutes who 
cannot report the conversations they have had with 
Nature. — Emerson. 



150 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

. . . under heaviest sorrow earth can bring 
If from the affliction somewhere do not grow 
Honor which could not else have been, a faith, 
An elevation, and a sanctity, 
The blame is ours, not Nature's. — Wordsworth. 

The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, 
neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: 
the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him. 

— EzekieL 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 151 

For Cheerfulness 
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine. — Proverbs, 

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers ? 

sweet content! 
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplexed ? 

punishment! 
Can'st drinli the waters of the crisped spring ? 

sweet content! 
Swimm'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thy own 
fears? 

punishment! 
Then he that patiently want's burden bears 
No burden bears, but is a king, a king! 

sweet content! — Dekker. 

Not rejoicing because we have quelled our lusts, 
but contrariwise, because we rejoice, quelling our 
lusts! — Spinoza. 

But I will hope continually. — Psalms, 

Age is opportunity no less 
Than youth itself, but in another dress. 
And as the evening twilight fades away 
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day. 

— Longfellow, 

Why labor at the dull mechanic oar 

When the fresh breeze is blowing. 

And the strong current flowing 

Right onward to the eternal shore ? — Clough, 



152 FELLOW CAPTAINS 

A good man wishes to live with himself, for his 
own company is pleasant to him. The memory of 
his past life is sweet and for the future he has good 
hopes. — Aristotle. 

Miirger said of himself that in reading Lafontaine's 
fables, his heart was always on the side of the sing- 
ing grasshopper. 

I must believe that life affords to the soul, as it 
does to the body, cheerful ways of growing strong. 

— William A. Smith. 

For many intellectual products the winter of the 
body is the autumn of the mind. A beautiful old 
age is for all beholders a delightful promise. 

— Jouhert. 

There is nothing so cheerful as wisdom; I had 
almost said, so wanton! — Montaigne. * 

There is something about Death 

Like Love itself. 

If with someone with whom you have known passion 

And the glow of youthful love 

You also, after years of life 

Together feel the sinking of the fire, 

And thus fade away together 

Gradually, faintly, dehcately, 

As it were in each other's arms, 

Passing from the famihar room; 

That is a power of unison between souls 

Like Love itself. — Masters. 



DOROTHY'S NOTE-BOOK 153 

Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not 
by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed 
or habitued. — Emerson. 



The loss of wealth is loss of dirt; 

As sages in all time assert. 

The happy man's without a shirt. — Heywood, 

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune 
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, 
A host in the sunshine, an army in June 
The people God sends us to set our hearts free. 

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell. 
The orioles whistled them out of the wood, 
And all of their singing was "Earth it is well," 
And all of their dancing was "Life, thou art good." 

— Bliss Carman. 

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the 
days of my life. — Psalms. 



